Conjure woman: Cultural performances of African American women writers (Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Julie Dash, Gayl Jones)

The eruption of the site of alternative moral grounds for black female sexuality survived slavery in the same manner as the Gullah language of South Carolina and religious vodun (voodoo or hoodoo). These West African beliefs did not replace European systems in the “New World” but neither did they disappear in the enslaved African's interaction with North American culture. Instead traditions, beliefs, and values were transformed. An examination of this transformation in the expression of black female sexuality reveals an overlooked site of resistance that may be read in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and writer/filmmaker Julie Dash. These writers construct characterizations of blues women (blues singers and/or single women who insist on defining their own sexuality) in their work that cast them in the role of “conjure women” who radically redefine or transform black female sexuality through an “alternative discourse of womanhood” that decenters the ideology of the nineteenth century in America, representations that persisted well into the twentieth century. Blues women neither responded to nor reacted against this ideology but rather entirely disrupted it in favor of a different set of values that subvert the Puritan ethic as basis. Thus, this project offers critical readings that examine African cultural contexts in terms of their relation to this radical revisioning of black female sexuality in order to highlight when and how “other” ways of being are privileged. Such analyses move forward responses to African American female sexual identity that react to its construction in binary oppositional terms to white female sexuality in favor of a different politics of identity by focusing on the gap created by the absence of African philosophical and religious systems as an important element in the revisioning of black womanhood.