Erotic eruptions and communal disruptions: Discourses of desire and resistance in 20th century black women's novels (Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones).

摘要

My dissertation focusing on black women's literature explores how the dynamic relationships of black women with their communities are impacted by the diverse factors of history, class structures, regional politics, racial tensions, and sexual dynamics. Such factors affect the representation in fiction of individual protagonists and the communities with which they engage and disengage. A topic of debate in black writings throughout this century revolves around the construction of black communities and these communities' desires for unity and integration. Such longing for solidarity, however, often results in the furthering of exclusive and essentialist notions of blackness and black womanhood. I argue that the novelists I discuss avoid representing such unitary concepts by emphasizing the importance of difference in constructions of community. In this dissertation I interrogate both the shifting politics that define what makes a black community and the effects of these politics upon black women's identity and subjectivity. The complex negotiations between black women and their communities involve a rethinking of the lexicons of communalism, of difference and belonging, of desire and deviance. The re-envisioning of what “community” means to these women protagonists is invariably linked to a critical re-thinking of black womanhood and female sexuality. My study of fictional works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones illuminates specific moments in black women novelists' reformulation of the body and of black female sexuality. Their novels expose the biases and misconceptions of communities based upon inherently problematic ideologies—such as the negative stereotypes surrounding female sexuality during the Harlem Renaissance, the sexist misconceptions of the 1970s Black Arts movement, and the 1980s and 90s black literary community's celebrations of the idealistic bonds of womanhood. The authors I discuss strategically engage in a rhetoric of sensuality and eroticism that counters racist and/or sexist discourses constructing the black female body as deviant, dangerous, and needing to be contained. Indeed, various conceptualizations of an erotic aesthetic; based upon developing discourses of desire and resistance, are deployed in these novels to provide the female protagonists with an alternate vision of self/communal consciousness. Rather than portraying simply idealized depictions of friendships between black women, the novels explore female relationships that are nurturing or violent, intimate or anxious, cohesive or divided. Common to all three authors is their representation of constantly migrating women in search of independence—of a definition of the female self not bound by the confines of domesticity.