Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic

197 Pages·2017·0.94 MB·English

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Dissertations
Fall 12-2010
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Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman
University of Southern Mississippi
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The University of Southern Mississippi

“THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”:

PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S

RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC

by

Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman

Abstract of a Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School
of The University of Southern Mississippi
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

December 2010
ABSTRACT

“THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”:

PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S

RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC

by Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman

December 2010

Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones’
Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization
of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The
writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist
aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women’s sexuality,
and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black
aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements
often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. An examination of their
works reveals the need for additional critical inquiry into the Black Arts era. More
importantly, this study suggests that these writers are deserving of more prominent
placement within the African American literary canon as the thematic content of their
novels presages that found in the works of more canonical writers like Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor.

ii
COPYRIGHT BY

WILLIAMENIA MIRANDA WALKER FREEMAN

2010
The University of Southern Mississippi

“THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”:

PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S

RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC

by

Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School
of The University of Southern Mississippi
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Approved:

____________________________________
Director

____________________________________

____________________________________

____________________________________

____________________________________

____________________________________
Dean of the Graduate School

December 2010
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. Sherita Johnson, and the other
committee members, Drs. Philip Kolin, Ellen Weinauer, Linda Allen, and Candice Love-
Jackson, for their advice and support throughout this project. I would especially like to
thank Dr. Sherita Johnson for her willingness to serve as chair and for her guidance. I
would like to extend an additional word of thanks to Dr. Candice Love-Jackson for her
faith in me and for her words of encouragement during those trying times.
I also thank the Andrew W. Mellon Programs for awarding me a United Negro
College Fund Mellon Faculty Doctoral Fellowship that enabled me to spend a year away
from my teaching duties to write this dissertation.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................1

Notes

II. “BOURNE-FREE”: MERLE KINBONA, POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND
THE COMMUNITY OF BOURNEHILLS IN PAULE MARSHALL’S
THE CHOSEN PLACE, THE TIMELESS PEOPLE .....................................29

Notes

III. “WHOSE WOMAN IS YOU…I [AIN’T] NO CORREGIDORA”:
REDEFINING BLACK WOMAN’S SEXUALITY IN GAYL JONES’
CORREGIDORA .........................................................................................77

Notes

IV. “HAVEN’T I SEEN YOU SOMEWHERE BEFORE?”: CONFRONTING
AND RECONCILING A SLAVE PAST IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S
KINDRED .................................................................................................124

Notes

V. CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................165

REFERENCES ................................................................................................................173

iv
1

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
[The black woman] is a college graduate. A drop-out. A student. A wife. A
divorcee. A mother. A lover. A child of the ghetto. A product of the bourgeoisie. A
professional writer. A person who never dreamed of publication. A solitary individual.
A member of the Movement. A gentle humanist. A violent revolutionary. She is angry
and tender, loving and hating. She is all these things—and more. “The Black Woman”—
Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman (1970)

Taken from the eponymous anthology, Bambara names and defines “the black
woman.” A compilation of poetry, short stories, and critical essays, The Black Woman is
important in its efforts to have black women validate their own Self (-ves) at a pivotal
moment for understanding the politics of identity in the latter half of the twentieth
century. The collection problematizes the interplay of race, class, and gender from the
perspective of black women.1 The text signals an effort on the part of black women to
assert their voices in racial and gendered discourses to which they had been historically
marginalized. Though black women novelists, dramatists, and poets had long established
a tradition of addressing these issues in their literary texts,2 1970 proved a watershed year
in propelling their concerns to the forefront as these writers seek inclusion into the social,
cultural, and political discourses (Civil Rights and Feminism) that had at times excluded
them and at others kept them from moving from “margin to center.”3 Seemingly, race
and gender certainly would serve as point of entry, but both movements excluded black
women’s direct involvement. Though black women had a visible presence, their
concerns were ignored. In essence, “all the women were white and all the blacks were
men”4 as iconic representations of these cultural movements.
Audre Lorde in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
posits that “black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it,
2

although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression [they] have developed joint
defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white
community...”(118). Though her original thesis centers on the inclusion of black lesbians
into the collective black community, her argument offers a method of addressing the
concerns of all black women. Simply put, though black men and women suffer from
racism, the burden they bear is different because of gender conditions. Black Nationalist
ideology that privileged racial patriarchy did not consider that black women also suffered
from sexist oppression. This failure to recognize black males’ culpability as potential
oppressors results in the dismissal of black women’s concerns and tries to limit their
agency. As bell hooks cogently observes:
Black male leaders of the movement made the liberation of black people
from racist oppression synonymous with their gaining the right to assume
the role of patriarch, of sexist oppressor. By allowing white men to dictate
the terms by which they would define black liberation, black men chose to
endorse sexist exploitation and oppression of black women. They were
not liberated from the system but liberated to serve the system. (Ain’t I
181)
My purpose is to interrogate the exclusion and marginalization of black women in
Black Nationalist and Aesthetic discourses by examining how black women writers of the
1960s and 1970s challenge the ideologies that were ostensibly about racial uplift and
unity but deny the explicit participation of black women. I offer Paule Marshall, Gayl
Jones and Octavia Butler as they “dare to verbalize [black women’s] resistance” (Lorde
119) to oppression. “The Black experience” meant the black man’s experience as black