Constructed silences: Voice and subjectivity in the resistance texts of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara

My dissertation examines four novels published between 1975 and 1980 by contemporary African American women writers who textually construct silence to function as an alternative discourse within their novels. The essentializing of the African American female voice parallels the essentializing of black female subjectivity. Writers such as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara employ narrative strategies which encode and thematize resistance to both imposed essences and imposed silences. In order to complicate accepted notions of black women's "essence," these writers strategically essentialize black female subjectivity; in order to denaturalize discourses in which black women are silenced, these writers thematize silence within their texts.; Doris Sommer suggests that the present critical moment is one in which "privileged readers" often ignore signs of social difference in some "minority" writing; if these signs were respected, they would "restrain the social power that follows from presuming to know." I contend that African American women writers have long resisted those readers who "presume to know," and have developed political and textual strategies to negotiate a heterogeneous audience. I align myself with critics who effectively draw on Bakhtinian theory to interrogate the black woman's voice as it is represented by and through multiple signifiers of subjectivity. Yet I differ from such critics as Mae Gwendolyn Henderson and Madhu Dubey by positing a theory of discourse that "reads" resistant silences within texts by African American women. Through my adaptation of feminist theories drawn from Foucault, I argue that the resistant texts of Jones, Walker, and Bambara reveal a black female subjectivity constructed through resistance to imposed essences and imposed silences. Through their negotiation of a heterogeneous audience, Jones, Walker, and Bambara speak from the authorized and essentialized subject-position of "black woman," and at the same time, resist the reductive essentializing imposed on African American women by mainstream literary study.