University of Tehran Research in Contemporary World Literature 2588-4131 30 1 2025 03 21 Female Genital Circumcision, Nationalism, and Politics of Empowerment: An Analysis of Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy on Black Feminist Thought Female Genital Circumcision, Nationalism, and Politics of Empowerment: An Analysis of Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy on Black Feminist Thought 135 156 100945 10.22059/jor.2024.366370.2464 FA Mitra Mirzayee Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Zeinab GhasemiTari Department of North American and European Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Seyed Mohammad Marandi Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran 0000-0003-3600-1008 Journal Article 2023 10 09 Understanding the complexity of the situation of African American women in the moral and social systems is one of the challenging topics in the literature of African Americans, which attracts the attention of many writers, especially female African American writers. Although the voice of women has often been marginalized in most cases and women have been more or less silent throughout history, the voice of black women has been more suppressed among them. The present article, by employing Patricia Hill Collins's approach based on the black feminist thought that addresses topics such as black nationalism, identity, and the politics of empowerment of black women, attempts to answer this question in the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy: how black nationalist movements, under the pretext of resisting the ideology of power and preserving the traditional values lead to weakening of the agency of African women. Employing the descriptive-analytical method, this research criticizes Walker's approach to some nationalist movements of African tribes and the promotion of female circumcision as a form of resistance against colonialism. The research findings indicate that Walker, through her novel, and Collins, through her black feminist criticism, have demonstrated almost similar actions from the perspective of confrontation with this type of cultural nationalism. Understanding the complexity of the situation of African American women in the moral and social systems is one of the challenging topics in the literature of African Americans, which attracts the attention of many writers, especially female African American writers. Although the voice of women has often been marginalized in most cases and women have been more or less silent throughout history, the voice of black women has been more suppressed among them. The present article, by employing Patricia Hill Collins's approach based on the black feminist thought that addresses topics such as black nationalism, identity, and the politics of empowerment of black women, attempts to answer this question in the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy: how black nationalist movements, under the pretext of resisting the ideology of power and preserving the traditional values lead to weakening of the agency of African women. Employing the descriptive-analytical method, this research criticizes Walker's approach to some nationalist movements of African tribes and the promotion of female circumcision as a form of resistance against colonialism. The research findings indicate that Walker, through her novel, and Collins, through her black feminist criticism, have demonstrated almost similar actions from the perspective of confrontation with this type of cultural nationalism. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_100945_a5a3e828cf2d10df3a9693a9fc3b2c34.pdf