Claiming B(l)ack manhood, claiming souls: Male portraiture in novels by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor. A womanist reading

This study is an examination of the black male portraiture in Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). Since the 1970s, among many of the controversies surrounding the writings of black women, one is on the reading of the black male portraiture: while female readers tend to see an implicit affirmation of black women, males tend to see a programmatic assault on black men. This study is an attempt to offer an alternative reading of the complexity of black male images in the three works by Walker, Morrison, and Naylor.; The critical approach is informed by Afroncentric womanism articulated by Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Michael Awkward, and Hortense Spillers. In her essay "Some implications of Womanist Theory," Williams embraces Walker's term "womanist" and explicates it as a commitment "to the survival and wholeness of an entire people, female and male, as well as a valorization of women's works in all their varieties and multitudes"; while Awkward contends that Afrocentric womanism requires "a recognition on the part of both black females and males of the nature of the gendered inequities that have marked our past and present, and a resolute commitment to work for change."; Thus study argues that Walker, Morrison, and Naylor, rather than simply portray their male characters as abusers, murderers, sadists, rapists, hyperpotent, good-for-nothing (the list can go on and on), which has traditionally been the outcome of much of the Eurocentric social science research and media presentation exploring the experience of black men, they are positioned to respond to that outcome by focusing on an alternative reading of black masculininty--a reading that is deeply grounded both in the social and historical realities of black people and in the womanist commitment to the survival and wholeness of black people.