The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping Analysis

Paradise (1997) Love (2003) A Mercy (2008)Home (2012) .Through her novels, Toni Morrison traced the plight of black people who have struggled the inferior social and economic status in a conspicuous culture. Morrison lodges a stern denunciation against the overriding society for its unfair tyranny of African-Americans. Blacks’ subjugated culture is made noticeable by her literary representation.

In O’Grady’s essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female, O’Grady criticizes the subordination of black female subjects in art. Culturally, art has constructed the identity of black females to be inferior compared to their white counterparts. As a consequence, viewers objectify black female bodies and tend to ignore the subject all together. “Olympia’s maid. Like all other ‘peripheral Negroes,’ is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery.” Rather than been seen a person in the drawing, she becomes an object viewers glance over. She is no more significant than the background. In fact, her inferiority is what highlights the nude body of her white female counterpart.

In the poem “Ego Tripping” by Nikki Giovanni it is evident that it is difficult to fix a past filled with misogyny, and patriarchy that advance women as feeble vessels, whose words and activities put men at risk. Despite the fact that it implies battling a custom of subordinating women that stretches out back a large number of years, the women’s activist development has since the mid-1970s attempted to give a voice to ladies that offers trust, gives quality, and proposes approaches to battle for more equality. Nikki Giovanni fights for change for African American women in the form of present tense language that shows women’s strength, power, and beauty. Although she is speaking in present tense, she is alluding to the future she wants women

Although a poet rooted in the folk tradition of the African American South, Finney’s work relies upon the spiritual and aesthetic influence of West African tradition, the womanist wisdom of her maternal grandmother, Beulah Lenorah Davenport, and her family’s political commitment to equality and social justice (Beaulieu 333). She mingles the personal with the public in order to share the experience with her readers and therefore truly express their feelings. “I think that my putting myself in my poetry is me saying to my readers and my listeners “I’m willing to stand here and be as vulnerable as perhaps I am making others and situations vulnerable in my work. I have to be willing to do that” (Finney, “Interview with: Nikky Finney.”).

Dee approaches culture by decontextualising it, while Maggie and Mama relate to it with a kind of ‘organic criticality’. The former stance is mere rhetoric and the later one is womanist. In one of her interviews, Alice Walker identifies three cycles of Black Woman she would explore in her woman’s writing: 1.

Walker’s essay shows the dehumanization and abuse that black women have endured for years. She talks about how their creativity was stifled due to slavery. She also tells how black women were treated more like objects than human beings. They entered loveless marriages and became prostitutes because of the injustice upon them. Walker uses her mother’s garden to express freedom, not only for her but for all the black women who had been wronged.

In the 1980’s black women are faced with a lot pressure in society, Because women of color are both women and racial minorities, they face more pressure in which lower economic opportunities due to their race and their gender. This pressure is reflected both in the jobs available to them and in their lower pay. Also because they are women of color they are likely to be the giver of the house and also within the families. Through the use of anecdotes,rhetorical questions, anaphora, ethos and metaphors, "In The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, Audre Lorde argues that women of color need to respond to racism with anger spurred from their fear and that not a bad thing depends on how anger is portrayed.

The discrimination against the white race begins with a gradual distinct treatment of the African Americans who appear to have a trace of the white race. Helene proves to have a more formal dialect as she asks for “the bathroom” (23) and the black woman cannot understand until Helene finally refers to it as “the toilet” (23). The difference in word choice distinct Helene from the African Americans in the Bottom. The fact that Helene also has fairer skin than the African Americans gives the black woman a reason to believe Helene has a trace of white. Therefore, when Helene approaches the black woman on the train, “[the woman fastens her eyes]…on the thick velvet, the fair skin, [and] the high tone voice” (23), as if surprised and shocked to see an African American women appear in such a manner.

Her image of a prim and proper Southern gentlewoman clashes with the down-to-earth, easy-going lifestyle of the lower middle class. Her incongruity as a refined Southern gentlewoman in an industrial, lower-middle class New Orleans neighbourhood marks her status as an outsider and contributes to her final

To be specific, she situates the imminent feminist struggle by highlighting the legacy of slavery among black people, and black women in particular. “Black women bore the terrible burden of equality in oppression” (Davis). Due to her race, her writing focuses on what she understood and ideas that are relevant to black females. Conversely, since white men used black women in domestic labor and forcefully rape these individuals. These men used this powerful weapon to remind black women of their female and vulnerability.

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become reality… I believe that the unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” - Martin Luther King Jr. Grace Hsiang in “FOBs” vs. “Twinkies” demonstrates the interracial issues happening in the Asian culture. Hsiang displays the interracial matter with the Asian culture and its complexity to embrace all sides of the community. She chooses diction in her writing such as discriminated, marginalized, pressure, and dichotomy to project the tone of her writing. While the article Black Men in Public Places illustrates the stereotypes and intraracial issues within the black men community.

Afro-American women writers present how racism permeates the innermost recesses of the mind and heart of the blacks and affects even the most intimate human relationships. While depicting the corrosive impact of racism from social as well as psychological perspectives, they highlight the human cost black people have to pay in terms of their personal relationships, particularly the one between mother and daughter. Women novelists’ treatment of motherhood brings out black mothers’ pressures and challenges for survival and also reveals their different strategies and mechanisms to deal with these challenges. Along with this, the challenges black mothers have to face in dealing with their adolescent daughters, who suffer due to racism and are heavily influenced by the dominant value system, are also underlined by these writers. They portray how a black mother teaches her daughter to negotiate the hostile, wider world, and prepares her to face the problems and challenges boldly and confidently.

At another level, it is a clear narration of how internalized concepts of beauty works in the minds of blacks and they themselves become their oppressors. All through the novel we can find numerous instances where “whiteness” is the measure for beauty. This is evident in all the characters in the novel who degrade themselves for not being fair and lovely like the whites. The novel is narrated through the eyes of a ten-year old girl Claudia McTeer who witnesses white hegemony around her as well as this superiority being unquestioningly accepted by the blacks. Sexism is one

She was influenced by the ideologies of women’s liberation movements and she speaks as a Black woman in a world that still undervalues the voice of the Black woman. Her novels especially lend themselves to feminist readings because of the ways in which they challenge the cultural norms of gender, slavery, race, and class. In addition to that, Morrison novels discuss the experiences of the oppressed black minorities in isolated communities. The dominant white culture disables the development of healthy African-American women self image and also she pictures the harsh conditions of black women, without separating them from the oppressed situation of the whole minority. In fact, slavery is an ancient and heinous institution which had adverse effects on the sufferers at both the physical as well as psychological levels.

Walker exposes the patriarchy that condones male domination of women. The novel is about the trials and tribulations faced by a black woman under colonialism and black male oppression and her journey to attain knowledge, identity and freedom. Walker’s womanism stems from her mixed ancestry-