Female Genital Circumcision, Nationalism, and Politics of Empowerment: An Analysis of Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy on Black Feminist Thought

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of North American and European Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jor.2024.366370.2464

Abstract

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.

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 30, Issue 1
March 2025
Pages 135-156

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