The love project: A theory of critical healing in the works of Black women writers

This dissertation argues that contemporary Black women writers (since 1970) have articulated theories of love and healing that are manifest in their narrative representations of two canonical concepts—self and memory. These theories, as engaged here, contend and converse with psychoanalytic, post-modernist, and post-colonial discourses; they extend “beyond the posts” and represent a school of contemporary literary thought, a new literary aesthetic that addresses the disruption of subject and the practice of mobility. This theorization of healing is termed “critical” to indicate the interdisciplinary rigor of the ideas, an indication intended to circumvent the scrutiny that often accompanies scholarly engagement of ideas such as love and healing. The project studies writers from the African diaspora, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones (United States); Michelle Cliff (Jamaica/U.S.), Audre Lorde (Grenada/U.S.), Myriam Warner-Vierya (Guadeloupe/Senagal), Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), and Paule Marshall (Barbados/U.S.).; In the first section, the project argues that the model of self and selfhood these writers creatively (re)present is summatively described by the folk notion of “being girlfriends,” an identity formation that is based on literal and figurative repetitions of self. This identification, which is relationally heteropathic, begins as a coupling between one subject and her an/other (her girlfriend) and exploits the idea of otherness. As a model, this paradigm of identity describes an intricate web of connections that ultimately are self-referential and political; confronts the limits of the Black body as figured in white narratives; and engages spirituality as a mode of identification and a foundation of selfhood.; In the second section, the project argues that these writers posit memory as a body. This argument challenges the metaphysics of corporeality (as encouraged by the articulation of identity in the first section) and attempts to restore the Black female body that is disturbed in Western imagination. Memory is represented as either a body in full, or a central attribute of the ways in which bodies are engaged and identified. In the context of corporealized memory, the process of coming to a relationship with memory is an ontological process, a state of being and becoming.