| Seldom are African American women's voices heard outside of their own community; therefore, I wanted to hear them speak. Specifically, I wanted to know if Beloved, African American literary work, could help African American women understand their own fives. I chose to do a qualitative study, allowing people to tell their own stories, in order to assess under what conditions African American women grow to exercise a strong positive sense of self and others and thereby have space for seizing power.;To achieve this goal, I used Toni Morrison's Beloved, because it confronts the issues presented by theorist Cornel West and Delores Williams: religion, socioeconomics, history, and education, and their impact on young African American women. In addition, I also used Morrison's Beloved in order to test Maxine Greene's pedagogical assumption that literature is a way for students, specifically African American women students, to become empowered. Thus, five interviewees, African American college women students, classification ranging from sophomore to seniors address me in narrative form by speaking to the question "How does Toni Morrison's Beloved articulate the present crises of the African American woman's interpretive community?";I first sent out flyers requesting an interview with all students at one African American all women's college institution who read Beloved . They were instructed to up on my door for a pre-scheduled time if they were interested. Before the interviews, however, there were class discussions with some of the students who read Beloved as well as panel discussions with many of the students on campus, who may not have read Belovedwhether they had read Beloved or not. With a student body of seven hundred there were an estimated one hundred who had read Beloved. Of those one hundred students, eight signed up to be interviewed. Of those eight, six actually followed through, and of those six subjects, one interview was accidentally erased from the cassette tape.;The results of my research suggest that African American students, if given the space for imagination through African American literature, will be able to understand their own lives and become better agents for democracy. |
