Black feminist Criticism March 2009 Liu ying

Bell hooks: Black women and feminism The black woman remained an absence from woman-centred thinking. The totalising gestures of feminism which seek to speak for all women disguise differences between women.

Barbara Smith: toward a Black feminist criticism Published in 1977, path-breaking essay No ready-made great traditions of Black women’s writing that is published Racism and sexism

Alice walker: In search of our mother’s gardens: forging black women writing tradition Zora Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker: common themes, common approaches

Beloved Beloved makes brutally clear that aside from the “equality of oppression” that black men and women suffered, black women were also oppressed as women.

As Morrison’s novel shows, physical abuse is humiliating, but the added emotional pain of a mother is devastating. Morrison also portrays the mother’s deed as a heroic act of resistance, one among many that constituted the quotidian experience of slaves.

Narrative technique Charting the journey back from the free present to the salve past, Beloved reverses the progressive movement of the salve narrative. Further, while the salve narrative privileged the individual’s account of coming to selfhood, Morrison’s narrative presents a multiplicity of voices, particularly women.