The Themes Of Diaspora In Alice Walker's Context

The novel Kindred by Octavia Butler is the story of a black woman, Dana, from the 1970s who time travels involuntarily between both life as a modern black woman and life on the Weylin plantation in the early 1800s in Antebellum Maryland. During the novel she interacts with her ancestors and experiences slavery firsthand; she attempts to change her great great grandfather Rufus’s possessive investment in whiteness and tries to protect her friends and ancestors. In the novel we see power and corruption dynamics play out in multiple ways between Rufus and Dana. Rufus grows from a young child oppressed by a demoralizing, abusive father into a manipulative man who gets what he wants through blackmail, threats, and rape. I will be investigating power

Alice Walker, a famous author, stated in her short story, Everyday Use, “Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts.” Each person’s identity is shaped from a culture that is built with the offering of everything in his or her surrounding environment. Culture is one of the most important factors, though there are many other contributing factors, that can influence someone’s perspective on the world because all of their opinions, decisions, and morals are all based off of their surrounding environment. In the poem and story, “My Mother Pieced Quilts” and Everyday Use, they both demonstrate how one’s cultural identity is influenced by his or her surroundings, changing the

Walkers essay is great of getting her audience to reminisce on the past by describing some childhood memories of life on the farm with the use of her beautiful language to share an image in Walkers memory.

Power had a huge part on how people were treated back in the times of slavery. In the novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, an African-American woman named Dana traveled between the 1800s and the present to help her great-grandfather throughout his life while also trying to shape him into a better person in the racist society that he was in. One of the things she noticed was how power could dictate how people lived their lives, especially since slavery was prevalent in the area her great grandfather, Rufus Weylin, lived in. Dana, Rufus, and Alice were all characters whose power affected how their lives turned out and the choices that they made.

“In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” Alice Walker talks about the hardships that black women had to face. She uses different ways to describe how black creativity has survived throughout the harsh times. She explains through the stories of women to tell the readers that African American women did not have the luxury to use their gifts, talents, and their abilities. She incorporates stories from her own family history and some from other people’s family history.They were not allowed to express who they were as individuals and instead were forced in to hard labor. Nonetheless, the women still managed to pass down their gifts to their children. If these are her theoretical statements about the vision of art “Everyday Use” is a story that fits

In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”, Walker juxtaposes two different daughters in their quest for a cultural identity. The narrator, their mother, talks about how each daughter is different; Dee went off to college and became well-educated, contrary to their impoverished and low status as black women in the south. Meanwhile, Maggie isn’t nearly as educated as Dee is, but is still literate. The entire story centers around Dee’s visit with her new Muslim significant other. The story’s climax is when Dee wants to take two special quilts back home, but those quilts are for Maggie. These precious quilts comprise their culture. Henceforth, Dee does not deserve to take the quilts with her because she has decided to take on a culture that varies significantly from her own and she is already used to getting what she wants.

The definition about power I think is what rules over what. The plot is three years into the Great Depression. Because of Mayella’s class and gender Mayella lacks power, but ner race makes her powerful.

In this historical and realistic novel, Meridian, written by Alice Walker, portraying the brutalities of life which most African Americans, especially women in the deep South, were forced to endure during the civil rights movement in the 1960s was a both a universal hardship and triumph for all of society. As the main character, Meridian Hill, repeatedly questions the value of her life through death and rebirth, she also seeks to discover the idealized woman, whom certain people repeatedly try to see inside of her while she repeatedly tries to bury that notion in the ground. Recurrently throughout this novel, Meridian tries to discover past memories of her inner self once again as time goes by. Through the uses of characterization,

The strongest example of women’s empowerment is Celie’s character.  She’s a victim of racism, men, sexual roles, and social injustices.  Celie begins the novel completely powerless,

Throughout history power has been extremely important. Although, there are a few things involving power that we've seen over and over again. Which are race, gender, and social class. Mayella is a woman who is going up against Tom Robinson in court. Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird he explores Mayella Ewell accusing Tom Robinson of rape. Mayella Ewell does not have power within her social class, and gender; although, she is powerful in regards to her race, because she is a white woman going up against a black man in court.

In the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the main character, Celie, is abused a multitude of times by Mr. ______, her husband. This abuse, paired with earlier abuse at the hands of her stepfather, shapes Celie’s opinions on abuse. The abuse Celie suffers begins to change her into an abuser herself, showcased by her suggesting to Harpo to hit Sofia to control her, but Shug helps to change the impact the abuse has had on Celie into empowerment, along with helping Celie get out of her situation by moving to Memphis.

As Boss Tweed used to say, “The way to have power is to take it.” Therefore, it is not surprising that the characters of Kindred by Octavia Butler fight throughout the book to gain power from each other. They all use methods ranging from violence to influence to gain even a slight amount of power from each other. Even Alice and Dana who are enslaved women during the 1800’s are able to use their words to influence their owners and the powerful white men in society. Like other black women during this time period, they use their bodies and other unconventional methods to slowly gain power over their owners until they are able to influence them to do what they want. Henceforth, Butler wants to demonstrate to the reader that, even during the antebellum south, enslaved women were able to use their influence, resilience and courage to eventually gain power over their owners.

When reading Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and “Everyday Use,” it is evident that she writes about her life through her use of allegory. Alice Walker uses the events of her childhood, her observation of the patriarchy in African American culture, and her rebellion against the society she lived in to recount her life through her stories. Alice Walker grew up in a loving household in the years towards the end of the Great Depression. Although her family was poor, they were rich in kindness and perspective and taught Walker a lot about her heritage and life.

In the novel Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author explores a number of issues such as religious absolutism, egalitarianism, feminism, domestic violence, politics and colonialism which in turn all highlight the main ideology of patriarchal power. By referring to the Oxford dictionary, the adjective ‘Patriarchal’ is described as “something relating to or denoting a system of society or government controlled by men.” In this specifically powerful novel, it refers to an organized society where the males are the heads of the families and the men are considered the “Fathers of the human race.” Adichie exposes a society that suffers devastation as an effect of total patriarchal control and intolerance within the family, the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the education and the state. Through the representation of the characters, she promotes the principle of a political system in which unrestricted power is in a dictator, and she identifies contrasting perceptions of religion, race, culture, spirituality, gender roles and the abuse of power. Throughout the novel, the reader is

In The Colour Purple, Walker cleverly uses the teachings of Christianity, a respected topic in American society, as the rose tinted lens to encase the key themes of racism and sexism throughout the novel. Furthermore, by doing so, she demonstrates the complexity of oppression at the time and provides insight into the stifling impact of traditional Christian teachings and the role this played on slowing the pace of meaningful reform. Through the common voice of Christianity, Walker portrays how black women can be both enslaved to, and liberated from, race and sex discrimination in American