Magda As Narrator: Counter/Demytholography

This book explains an African American woman’s life from experiencing slavery first-hand, to, at last, freedom. I will use examples of the harsh encounters Gaspar and Hine explain throughout this novel to support my main topic of my thesis; the theme of the corrupt power of slavery Harriet Jacob

Alice Walker also offers a crucial intertwining of private and public in The Color Purple. The political language, with its affiliation with historical values and patriarchal power, as opposed to the utopia created by everyday life relations among the women, forms the central thread of the novel. The novel problematizes the Afro-American national historical identity through Celie’s reduction of American’s tale of Columbus and his boat, Neater, to cucumber and other garden variety phonetics. The episode highlights the important role oral and folk transmissions play in the reproduction of nation and

The globalized black experience, informed by collective cultural identity, shared history, common experience of racial oppression and marginalization by racist ideologies, is represented in narratives transforming it into a discourse of subversion and resistance. The novel, Kindred, by the Afro-American writer Octavia Butler, employs the fantastic element of time travel to present the Black diasporic experience as a continuum which forms a link between the cultural past and the present day hybridized identities. Dana, the Black female protagonist of the narrative, finds herself sporadically travelling between her present day life in 1976 California and the antebellum South plantation in 1815

Nervous Conditions is a partially autobiographical novel by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga that takes place in Rhodesia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It focuses on the themes of race, class, and gender through the eyes of Tambu, the young female protagonist. The title references Jean Paul Sartre 's introduction to Frantz Fanon 's 1963 book The Wretched of the Earth, in which he writes, "the status of 'native ' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among the colonized people with their consent." Dangarembga expands Fanon 's exploration of African people oppressed by a colonial regime by incorporating the gender-specific role of black women, who are arguably doubly oppressed. The women in Dangarembga 's novel grapple with "nervous conditions" borne from years of colonialism as well as the continued oppression under the Shona power system.

The recognition of African cultural legacy is a fundamental element so as to comprehend black identity and its rich culture, and Paule Marshall, as an American of African descent, is keen on “showing Black characters that boldly fight white supremacy in a positive light, in an attempt to help liberate her readers, at a personal level, from believing negative images about Blacks”(Fraser, 2012: 527). The author’s fiction evidently goes hand in hand with politics in the pursuit to bring consciousness, acknowledgment and assimilation among Black cultures in the West. Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow is an influential novel which sketches the internal journey that the main character undergoes so as to reconnect with her long-lost roots and eventually her coming to terms with the fact that she is part of the African diasporic community. Thus, my essay will examine how Avey Johnson’s spiritual

In Willa Cather’s essay she unfolds Sarah Jewett’s ability to express her feeling for writing through her diction to form art. In Sarah Jewett’s novel, her feeling for writing is shown through her main character who came to New England to write her own novel. Jewett shows the struggles she feels when writing her own novels through her character. In one of the passages she writes, “Literary employments are so vexed and uncertainties at best and and it was not until the voice of conscience sounded louder in my ears than the sea on the nearest pebble beach that I said unkind words of withdrawal to Mrs. Todd”(18). Miss.

The following essay concentrates on superstitions and folklore in Chesnutt’s stories, and how Chesnutt uses African American folklore to celebrate his black identity throughout telling these stories. I use several scholarly articles which published in different periods. In the essay, “African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt 's The Conjure Woman,” (Western Journal of Black Studies 36.4 [2012]: 325-336), Donald M. Shaffer Jr. argues that Chesnutt’s collection can be considered as a “racial project”. Chesnutt narrates these tales in order to destroy the concept of hierarchy and race in American society. The “race project” can be seen as linkages between the oral act of

She wrote poems describing her beliefs and feelings about the inequality. She often used religion and spiritual beliefs to relate to her situation. In her poem “On Being Brought From Africa To America” she states, ”Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, taught my benighted soul to understand that there’s a god, that there’s a Savior too.” In this statement, she is saying that it was god’s plan that she came to America and she understands it is will. She also says, “some view or sable race with a scornful eye, their color is a diabolic die, remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” She explaining that although people view their race as terrible people god still loves

African-American author Toni Morrison 's book, Beloved, describes a black culture born out of a dehumanising period of slavery just after the Civil War. Culture is a means of how a group collectively believe, act, and interact on a daily basis. Those who have studied her work refer to Morrison 's narrative tales as “literature…that addresses the sacred and as an allegorical representation of black experience” (Baker-Fletcher 1993: 2). Although African Americans had a difficult time establishing their own culture during the period of slavery when they were considered less than human, Morrison believes that black culture has been built on the horrors of the past and it is this history that has shaped contemporary black culture in a positive way. Through the use of linguistic devices, her representation of black women, imagery and symbolic features, and the theme of interracial relations, Morrison illustrates that black culture that is resilient, vibrant, independent, and determined.

Rochester always honest? Was he always the Rochester we know from Jane Eyre whose past we know so little about? Obviously, this question bothered the second author Jean Rhys who decided to inform the people about the young Mr. Rochester and portrayed his life before Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea is an original and peculiar novel inspired not only by Edward Rochester, but also fascinated by the mysterious character of Rochester’s Creole wife Bertha. The novel is a balladic, love story from ancient colonial times where Antoinette Cosway is portrayed as a parallel of a madwoman in the attic in Thornfield depicted in Jane Eyre.