Masters of Gender Studies

This paper aims at depicting the historical ordeals, that African-American women went through, and the interpolation of these hardships; slavery, apartheid, racial slurs, and other forms of racial exclusion, into a fiction of their own. In it, data will be extracted from Ana Nunes’s African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction. In its outset with Gunnar Myrdal, this output will, furthermore, mention one of the earliest realizations of black history with his work An American Dilemma, and its advent to White Americans’ lives. Afterwards, it will conduct an account on the ways in which these women [African-American Women] came to grips with the relationship between history and literature, in their rewriting of slavery and the historical apartheids of their kinfolks. An embodiment of this would be illustrated by the work of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, alongside its pivotal emphasis on orality, oral testimonies or/and oral culture/history. In similar fashion, following the model of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee which came to be deemed as a tour de force for African American historical novel, Jones’s Corregidora will also be part of both an account of the historical impacts, and an analysis of Jones’s reliance on folk speech and oral word. Therefore, the limelight will be shed on two main works, Jubilee and Corregidora as they both sought to adroitly represent slavery and the fringe side of the African American experience from their own vantage point, in an attempt to demystify and debunk the prevailed versions of the white hegemonies. And also, because these two works attempt to revise the history and record a neo-slave narrative with experienced and quasi-experienced events, relying highly on folk and oral history to bring an authentic version of their own.