Racism in Alice Walker’s The Complete Stories

2018

Alice Walker’s novels from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Now is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004) are the historical documents. These novels delve into the historical oppression of the African Americans in the United States of America and document the intricacies of race and gender in relation to class distinctions responsible for the racial intolerance in South and North America. Walker focuses on racism, sexism, and classism in all her novels and her treatment of these issues in her fiction is organic and integral. She regards sexism, racial capitalism, and patriarchy; as the prime cause of women’s oppression. As an intellectual, Walker addresses the issues of domestic violence, racial disparity and pitiable conditions in poverty, gender bias, interracial relationships, and the children, imposed pregnancies and abortions, rapes and lynching, genital mutilation and cultural terrorism, violence, and non-violence in the Civil Right era and the ecological problems invited by the capitalist imperialism and the question of survival and the need to free mind and body from detrimental wheels of oppression in society. This paper presents the dispossessed world of the African American women and their resistance against the extremist forces and religious fanaticism relegating their existence to lesser human beings.

Malaysian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (MJSSH), 2019

Through this part the researcher introduces a sufficient analysis of Walker's selected novels to reflect the ill-treatment against black women in American society from 1970 to 1982. The researcher will analyze Walker's characters to offer a real justification of the racial oppression, cruelty, unkindness and misery that most of African American women have been faced on the hand of the whites American especially in the south. The researcher support and analyze this subject by trace the life of the main characters that suffer from ill-treatment and racial oppression. The researcher analyzes these texts with regard to black feminist critical theory, to discuss the main themes by tracing group of heroines who live, represent and portray these topics through a contemporary black American author Alice Walker in her selected novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian , The Color Purple. Referring to the main themes in the statement of the problem and first research questions the researcher achieve that all the characters of the novels are racially oppressed.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH: LITERATURE, LANGUAGE & SKILLS, 2018

International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Review and Studies, 2024

Afro-American Writers like Alice Walker have been spine to women liberation from Racism and sexism. Alice Walker have contributed a great deal to expand the understanding and awareness in literature regarding prevailing social vices like Racism and Sexism that African woman have continuously been subjected to. The purpose of this paper is to study how dynamics of traumatizing evils like Sexism, Racism along with Motherism, Womanism in works of Alice walker represent conditions of Black women. Moreover, racism and sexism are interconnected with Gender violence which is a theme in the two selected works The Color Purple and Possessing The Secret Of Joy. Walker urges black women to recognize their connectedness to women who historically have built bridges for them with their indomitable and independent spirit. The fact of being black mother and over that a woman in racist and sexist society is well expressed through characters in these two works by applying a womanistic approach.

NU, 2016

Playing the main theme in a number of literary works, racism is one of the most sensitive social problems that many societies have long been encountering. The purpose of this research is to portray and comparison of African-American racism in American short stories which written by African American writers in Jim Crow’s period and Black Power movement period. Four selected short stories; two from Jim Crow’s period and the other from Black Power movement, were analyzed by African-American literary criticism which divided into three types of racism: institutional racism, internalized racism, and intraracial racism. The study findings indicate that African Americans faced a lot of suffering in White society in both period but in difference form. In Jim Crow’s period, white people are clearly superior to black people as black people were forced to labor as slaves and controlled by whites. There are also a lot of tension of the racism and a lot of violence. In Black Power movement period, racism is seen in the form of social injustice and economic inequality regardless of the fact that black people appear to have more freedom and opportunities compared to the previous period.

This paper approaches the theme of human rights from the perspective of racism (social and political discrimination based on biological differences) and sexism (the discrimination of the woman based on the opinion that she is less able than the man). Those were issues that engaged the greater attention of black writers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ralph Ellison. From a survey of selected works by African-American writers of that period, the paper argues that the black population, while it hailed the structural racial reforms, was concerned that the legislative dismantling of segregative structures had not changed the fundamental discriminatory attitude of whites. It further shows that the black woman faced another kind of discrimination not only as a person of colour but also because of her gender; discrimination, sadly, even from her own black society.

2012

The paper explores the presentation of violence in Alice Walker’s works ranging from domestic violence, public fighting and murder in general. I argue that the black men’s family is portrayed as an arena for violent manifestations. Being the architect of such violent manifestations, the Blackman strike readers as an individual who is always being assailed by an ill-defined curse, a black American curse and as “feeble minded” as he is projected to be, he fails to transcend that inauspicious curse. He thus becomes the worst enemy of the black family, always playing the blame the victim trump card; beating his wife and women in general, castigating and cajoling the very premise upon which strong filial bonds can be predicated upon. Thus, in the process he puts the black woman in a double bind where she has to grapple with a wider and vicious system and where she also has to tame the “rabid” and “unthinking brute” for a husband or for a father. Plausible as Walker’s projections may look...

Nawa Journal of Language and Communication, 2013

From the American Revolution to the present, African American female writers have not only articulated the physical horrors of the female slave, but have also celebrated the black American women's lives through their works. For Walker, African American women have suffered a triple oppression of gender, race and class. Thus, using the selected texts, this paper will show Walker's preoccupation with the black American woman, especially the way she is marginalised and subjugated by both the colonial and slave system and her black male counterpart. As an African-American woman, Walker also celebrates the lives of the American black women by giving a voice to the oppressed and voiceless. In her narratives, she criticises both racist and sexist hegemony. This article will show how the women in the selected texts have played a myriad of roles in their search for self-definition and spiritual redemption. In The colour purple, The third life o f Grange Copeland, and also in Walker's essays, In search o f our mother's gardens, she argues that the black women have been notable for standing against oppression and have made significant contributions in the making of the American nation. Hence, this article intends to show that despite being oppressed, African-American women have never succumbed to victimhood. It seeks to examine how Alice Walker celebrates the black-American women's search for identity and fulfilment through a harmonious co existence with their men-folk. The article will conclude that Walker transcends binary oppositions to explore the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and triumphs of black women'. Through self-expression, her women characters undergo some form of transformation and hence celebrate a sense of wholeness embedded in a viable past.

European Scientific Journal, 2012

This study attempts to explore an issue that has become the source of embarrassment for one of the greatest empires in history, an empire that prides itself on the one hand for being the leading democracy of the world while at the same time harboring glaring social injustice and racial discrimination. The problem of discrimination or racism will be traced in two novels that follow a certain fictional and historical timeline: CaptainBlackman by John A. Williams (1972), and A Death in Texas: a Story of Race, Murder, and Struggle of a Small Town's Redemption by Dina Temple-Raston (2002). In these novels, the African-American characters explore the world of racism, judge their experiences, and make a choice to stand out in a world dominated by a white population.

This paper discusses the resistance of black women characters in the novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Morrison and Walker deal with same themes of their social engagement in the creation of their fictional world. The protagonists in the novels play an essential role in their development and in the society's development. As black women, the protagonists in the novels are struggling through sequential difficulties. They struggle both as blacks and as women in the society for survival. While they are discriminated against by racism, they are even lead to undergo domestic violence and maltreatment at the hands of men in their life. Women were treated only as Reproductive Machines. They are not considered as human being. They are rejected to express their individuality. Their intelligence was neglected by the male characters throughout the novels. They were suppressed and abused. Relations of incest are seen in most of their novels. Morrison and Walker are best to represent the transformations of their characters and their communities, showing us how being and becoming are intricately tied to the telling and visualizing of one's story (life). At the end, these protagonists create an order out of chaos and reach their pinnacle.