ABSTRACT
This study is concerned with an appraisal of Race, Identity and
Perspectives of African American Women in the Selected Works of Toni
Morrison and Rita Dove about the African American community, within the
context of the United States of America. Over the years African American
women writing has not been accorded due relevance within the American
literary space. As such, black male writers have dominated the literary
scene for long, being literarily the spoke persons on the specific and
general dimensions of black people‟s existence and experience in
America. This position is now being contested by black women writers
such as Toni Morrison and Rita Dove. In other words, the claim of a
homogenous black experience is now being debated and challenged by these
African American women writers through different literary platforms.
Thus, these black women writers foreground women characters who are now
subjects of their own narrations. This research apprehends the various
views of African American women about themselves, about the African
American community and how their perspectives have contributed
significantly to shaping the concerns bordering on history, existence,
experience and the community of black people in America via different
literary platforms. Significantly therefore, this research employs
various genres of literature, specifically the novelistic art form and
the poetic genre, as parameters for the exploration of the complex
dynamics of African American community in America. To this extent, the
study contends that the poetic genre of literature is also a distinctive
genre that similarly apprehends the African American reality and should
be emphasized alongside the novel form which has gained popular
acceptance in the literary circle. This thesis employs the postcolonial
praxis as a rewarding paradigm for investigating the works of Morrison
and Dove, especially as it facilitates the foregrounding of such
critical parameters as hegemony, hybridity, mimicry, conflict, power
dynamics, identity, gender to name a few and how these concerns are
implicated in the existence and experience of black people in America.
This research work is presented in six chapters. Chapter one is the
introduction, which provides a background on the conceptual framework of
the research. It comments on the origin and development of African
American writing as well as the emergence of African American women
writing. Chapter two delineates the dynamics of slavery in Morrison‟s A
Mercy. Chapter three locates the place and position of African American
identity in Morrison‟s Paradise. Chapter four interrogates the concept
of race in the globalized American society in Rita Dove‟s American
Smooth. Chapter five appraises the dilemma of mothering in Dove‟s Mother
Love. Chapter six, the concluding chapter brings to bear the central
arguments and findings of the study and its contributions to knowledge
in the field.
INTRODUCTION
African American literature acts as a creative umpire that offers
possibilities for blacks in the United States to mediate their general
aspirations and desires. As a body of literature, black writing started
in the 18th century as the medium that provides African Americans the
platform to interrogate the dynamics of the African American identity,
community and experience within America. According to Abah (2008) “the
culture of African American writing is traceable to the middle of the
18th century, although the issues at the front-burner of this literature
extend beyond two hundred years. In truth the life of bondage and
enslavement became the necessary materials which were to translate into
black writing”(7). Abah‟s contention brings to the fore the root and
origin of African American literature and its relationship with the
social context of America. Commenting on the destabilizing nature of the
life of bondage in America, Kenneth Stampp (1956) observes that African
Americans were seen as slaves who were “deemed, held, taken, reputed
and adjudged in law to be chattel slaves, in the hands of their captors,
owners, possessors, executors, and administrators, to all intents,
constructions and purposes whatsoever” (97). This debate suggests that
the tragedy of blacks in America did not begin with the ordeal of
Reconstruction, or with the agony of the civil war, but with the growth
of what Kenneth Stampp sees as a “peculiar institution”, that is, the
institution of slavery in the ante-bellum days. Thus, “the engendering
impulse of African American literature is resistance to human tyranny
and the dedication to black dignity and identity” (Gates et al 2003). In
other words, the struggles against the institution of slavery in
America formed the fabric for black writing and subsequently the impetus
for its development. In his review of Frederick Douglass‟ Narrative of
the life in 1845, Lucius Matlock as cited in Gates and Mckay (1997),
notes that: The soil of slavery itself – and the demands for its
abolition – turned out to be an ironically fertile ground for the
creation of a new literature, a literature indicting oppression, a
literature created by the oppressed: “from the soil of slavery sprung
forth some of the most brilliant productions, whose logical levers will
ultimately upheave and overthrow the system (xxvii). From Matlock‟s view
it is evident that the context of the emergence of black writing falls
within the purview of an unbearable social environment of slavery in
America. Thus, Jonathan Earle (2004) posits that “the abolition of
slavery further created the environment for the thriving of African
American literature” (4). Evidently, Earle is of the view that the
elimination of slavery paved way for a more suitable platform for the
development of black writing. It is in the light of this therefore that
African American writers employed literature as a medium to express the
plights and hopes of black people in America.