Cultural Sites of Critical Insight

The American Indian Quarterly, 2009

Contemporary Womens Writing, 2008

Julia Alvarez uses the conventions of domestic femininity, womanhood, and motherhood to resist patriarchal authority both at the level of private family life and in public institutions, including government. These uses simultaneously demonstrate that resistance to domination involves shift- ing power dynamics and strikingly underscore sexual difference in rela- tion to power, resistance, and genius. Alvarez’s fiction powerfully portrays how shifting power relations are gendered and are inflected by race and class.

2007

2007

Some of the latest studies in Black Feminism are concerned with outlining itshistorical evolution as a discipline, as well as envisioning major tasks to undertakein the future. Other studies compile features underlining a common ground ofthematic links among different arts, thus interrelating cultural expressions fromdifferent genres. There also seems to be a particular interest in compilinganthologies including outstanding, but often neglected, artists from differentmanifestations of African-American culture. Taking the first premise into account,many critics have focused on outlining the evolution of Black Feminist literarystudies from a historical perspective. V.P.Franklin (2002) dwells upon the reasonswhy Black Feminism arose during the 1970s as a response to the lack of attentionAfrican-American women had to bear both in Black Studies, eminently male, andthe Women’s Liberation Movement, primarily white. By coining the term‘womanism’ in her seminal book

Contemporary Literary Criticism, 2005

Subtitled A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook, Paula Gunn Allen's Grandmothers of the Light guides the reader into the "void"--the Great Mystery--where the power of female thought is essential to creativity. This assertion of Native American myths concerning the origin and processes of life, a metaphorical return to the womb, is for Allen, an affirmation of gender and cultural identity, a reclamation of personal and cultural self-awareness which results in transforming energy. "She finds that in the void there is energy, and it is an energy that is self-aware." Evidence of this awareness is apparent in Allen's reinstatement of female significance into Native American myths and rituals, which she describes in "Kochinnenako in Academe" as a "feminist-tribal" exploration of gynocentric principles. Despite its, at times, didactic and contradictory qualities, Grandmothers is a significant book providing insight into a personal and empowering transformation and suggests the many complications which arise with identity formation and colliding cultures. Allen's writing evidences the impact of this collision.

Utopian Studies

Unpublished, 2008

Toni Morrison is hailed as one of the major contemporary African – American women writers. A Nobel laureate for literature in 1993, she has established her reputation as an important commentator on the plight of black women in America. She is an artist first and foremost and her artistic pursuits are always combined with the issues concerned with her community, women in particular. She is well aware of Bell Hook’s question to white women – “Ain’t I a woman ?” and goes on delineating a picture of herself, through the characters in her novels, as marginalized and neglected species. All her protagonists live in search of identity. From The Bluest Eye to Love the last novel she wrote – struggling against the prevalent ideology, and through hostile circumstances and are often defeated as victims, Morrison, however, does not take extreme stand. Though her characters are mutilated by the discriminatory norms in American Society, they are not angry or aggressive. On the other hand, they reveal broader understanding towards the white race and towards their own male folk, Morrison, as a novelist draws a very miserable picture of black women in America in novels like The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Beloved etc. and effectively show that they are the victims of racism and sexism at the same time. The present thesis is an attempt to interpret the novels of Toni Morrison in the light of black feminism. Black Feminism, however, works differently at the hands of different artists, Toni Morrison adopts a liberal stand. After treatment of the characters in the novels make her more ‘womanist’ then ‘feminist’ in a sense that they suffer in silence and reconcile to the fate. Nevertheless Morrison’s portrayal of these characters clearly shows that they are in search of dual identity, being black and women at the same time.

Along the path of development and growth of the aspiring intellectual, one is sure to engage - especially within a Western Epistemology - in a practice riddled with limited dichotomies that leave very little room for a additional sources of academic validity, namely the “visceral”. Within the scope of the sessions set forth to express the effect(s) of the work of James Baldwin at the College Language Association’s 2013 symposium, one work in particular has continued to stand out as it speaks to the role of self exploration in addressing societal issues, his essay entitled The Creative Process (1962). Throughout The Creative Process, Baldwin identifies the role of ‘The Artist’ in realigning misaligned perceptions of societal problems. The artist exists as a necessary balancing force tasked to identify the truth at all costs in the face of right and wrong. The definition of an artist, or who can be conceived as such, is broad and has much potential for how it can be applied, whereas I myself define the artist as any individual who has taken on the task of functioning within their slice of society, at any capacity. I seek to focus on and apply the notion that Baldwin sets forth as a pre-condition of being able to function as “the artist”; the conquest of self. Humility has an important place in academia, and I believe that if Baldwin’s ‘conquest of self’ can serve to affirm visceral forms of expression as valid sources of information in academia.

Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, University of Cincinnati, 2019