Possessing the secret of black womanhood : reading African women in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy, The Color Purple, and Warrior Marks
Master Thesis
2004
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University of Cape Town
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Speaking for or about others has featured consistently in current feminist debates as it is becoming clear that the assumed homogeneity of women within social groups is not realistic. It has become clear that difference can no longer be analysed in terms of race, gender and sexuality alone. Other factors such as history, nationality, and culture demand more attention than they have been previously accorded, which makes many alliances across national boundaries subject to redefinition and reconceptualisation. This thesis looks at the attendant dangers of ignoring the differences within alliances based on race and gender. I analyse Alice Walker's representation of African women and female circumcision in her novels Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Color Purple and her documentary film Warrior Marks and its accompanying book of the same name the text, to argue that when national and cultural differences are sacrificed for sisterhood and solidarity based on a superficial universalisation of racial and gender oppression, the totalising, discursive tendencies that many critics objected to in second wave mainstream feminism are replicated. Walker differentiates between African women as objects of her discourse and the Western women as its audience. In her representation of Africa and Africans, particularly African women, she is not self-reflexive enough to explore the impact of her ideological location in the West on her identity. Thus, she does not create enough distance between her cultural and ideological upbringing to be able to escape the charge of ethnocentrism. Because she reads African women from her location in American culture, her work is best read within the African American literature on Africa and Africans dating back three centuries. That the sisterhood that Walker's work advances between African American and African women is informed by unequal power relations between the West and Third World is made clear by her deployment of her womanist ethic in two of her novels, The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy. A comparison of the two novels shows that Walker overemphasises the differences between Africans and African-Americans in order to assert the superiority of African American identity to African identity. From her politics in both these novels it becomes clear female circumcision provides Walker with an opportunity to air her Africanist/neo-colonialist attitudes. Her texts on African women, in Possessing the Secret of Joy in particular, evinces her indebtedness to the imperialist tradition of writing about Africa as it is a projection rather than a perception. And like most imperialist texts, it tells us more about her pathologies and obsessions as a representing subject than about the Africans she seeks to portray. The position that she creates for herself in the novel is problematic because it is predicated on the essentialist notion of race and gender, and on a slippery identification process that casts her as both subject and object. This thesis does not look at the practice of female circumcision in Africa, but at Walker's representation of the practice. This is mainly because Walker’s representation of Africans is part of a larger discourse on African women: for Walker female circumcision provides vehicle for her to participate in this discourse.
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Nako, N. 2004. Possessing the secret of black womanhood : reading African women in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy, The Color Purple, and Warrior Marks. University of Cape Town.