Through the Lens of Womanism: The Black Mother's Womb as the Origin of Africana Diasporic Commonweal (2013)

Undergraduate: Amarachi Rossana Anakaraonye

Faculty Advisor: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher
Department: African, African American & Diaspora Studies

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It is from Alice Walker's theory of womanism and its commitment to the "survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female" that I examine African American, Francophone Caribbean, and Africana diasporic womanist novels of the second half of the twentieth century. The novels that I examine are: Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970); Maryse Condé's Hérémakhonon (1976); and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). In each novel, through my examination of intergenerational matrilineal trauma, I problematize how the psychological and physical abuse of a mother, a literal and figurative figure, impacts the ability of her daughter to escape self-inflicted, socio-political, and familial abuse.