Book Title: World of Philosophy
Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
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Comparing and Contrasting the Representation of Women in the Works of Select Black Male Writers and Black Female Writers
- Dr. Nutan Damor
I would like to begin my paper by saying that we are living in the best of times. Even in the midst of natural and man-made disasters like cyclones, earthquakes, global warming and terrorism, there are moments of triumph for the people living in the margins of the mainstream cultures. It is the time for these marginals to claim their stake at the center. The PostColonial world has opened up the possibilities for the downtrodden people to speak out and establish their identities.
Every nation, society, community and even family has its own marginals. Hence, all these units have witnessed some kind of resistance in the last century. Women have been marginalized not only within the society and community but also within the four walls of the family system. Patriarchy has systematically confined women within the walls of the family using religion and culture as its major tools.
Women and their representation in the works written by male authors has been an area of debate since a long time. Women have felt that men have not made any conscious effort to depict the true picture of womenkind in their literature. Most of the times women characters are represented quite marginally, that too, only in relation to the male protagonists. Like in all the walks of life, the world of literature was also male-dominated. Whether it is Shakespeare or Hemingway women are almost invisible. Women are a marginal group without whom no literature is possible but yet their representation is far from true.
Black women in American Literary world have fared no better. It was only towards late 1960's that Black women writers began to challenge the stereo-typical representation of the American Black women. Till then Black women were written about by either the White writers or the Black male writers. Black women were presented either as "mammies"- an allloving, all caring, untouched or rather appreciative of the highly oppressive racist environment- or as a mere secondary presence in the lives of the Black men. Neither of these representations gave the real picture of the Black women. Her life was never chronicled in its entirety, her pains, her losses, her triumphs, her survival tactics found no expression.
Black male authors like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Alex Haley have no strong women characters. They have been concentrating only on racism and its ill-effects on the entire Black community, and women being a part of the community their presence was also felt but not highlighted. Women were present only to be raped and murdered. A classic example of this kind of portrayal is James Weldon Johnson's novel titled The Conjure Woman,
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