FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA: CULTURAL TIES THAT BIND IN THE WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS (FLORA NWAPA, NIGERIA, EFUA THEODORA SUTHERLAND, AMA ATA AIDOO, GHANA, TONI MORRISON, PAULE MARSHALL, BARBADOS, ALICE WALKER)

The history of Black Women's literature started long before Black women were finally allowed their right to literacy; their creative art was an oral one, rooted in storytelling and the African/Afro-American folk tradition. Thus, when Black women began to write creative works, they looked back to their foremothers to recreate these stories into literature. This dissertation explores the cultural bonds between African and Afro-American women as illustrated in the writings of contemporary authors of the United States and West Africa. The study focuses on the concept of "generational continuity"--the passing down of cultural history and community values--as traditionally women's domain.; The design of the dissertation consists of two sections, "The Africans" and "The African-Americans." In the first section, I focus on the West African writers Flora Nwapa, Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, examining the role of women in passing on cultural values to future generations. These writers' works are also used as a criterion for African culture and lifestyles in the later section. The second section is devoted to Afro-American writers Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall, who are self-consciously evoking African culture in their writings to help create a more integrated Afro-American community through a greater acceptance of their African heritage.; With the voice of the Black woman writer on both sides of the Atlantic, we see a new perspective on the bonds between Africans and African-Americans. The writers' concerns may not be entirely different from their male counterparts in wanting to communicate a message, liberate and bolster their own culture, and improve their society; but in the manner of production and the focus of the material, these women have a distinguishable aim. The Black women writers address the formerly unvoiced members of the community--the wife, the barren woman, the young child, the mother, the grandmother. They look at their existence in a continuum, an invisible thread drawn through the stories of the women characters to the women readers and the men who will listen. African values and traditions have been handed down from mother to child across time and the Atlantic to foster both modern African and African-American cultures. And it is most probable that by telling the tales of one's people to future generations, Black women throughout the diaspora have kept those similarities alive.