Renarrating the 'private': Gender, family, and race in Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison

This dissertation considers African American women's literature as a historical site for the textualization of racialized and gendered relations in the U.S., and as specifically situated critiques and possible alternatives to those relations. I argue that black Women's writings deconstruct discourses that ideologically reproduce the liberal-democratic state and the capitalist economic system which constitutes the U.S. nation-state. They thematize how the racial history of chattel slavery and ongoing institutionalized discrimination and exploitation of black labor have disrupted notions of the nuclear family, bourgeois domesticity, economically and racially defined gender roles, and the production of separate spheres.; I read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1973) and The Color Purple (1982), and Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Paradise (1998) as novels that explore how the material, ideological, and psychological violence of racism generates tensions in the black family, and within gender, marital, and work relations. I utilize Marxist feminist critiques of liberal theories of the capitalist state, with a particular emphasis on the ideological construction of gendered separate spheres. However, I argue that these black women's texts offer critical epistemologies about social relations and structures in the U.S. that exceed the analytical terms yielded by existing paradigms. They illuminate how class, racial and gender inequalities are reproduced by the production of the public and private as distinct spheres of social, economic, and political activity.; I posit that black women writers' fictional selection of intraracial relations and domestic scenes to thematize racial oppression registers oppositional possibilities in larger social politics. Their works provide the topoi of black female autonomy, intraracial connection, intersubjective models of family and community, and economic empowerment that are alternatives to either capitalist or utopian visions. I suggest that the writings of black women and those of other aggrieved groups can generate subversive challenges outside the U.S. as well. African American literary criticism can be a significant intervention in alliance with black cultural production especially in locations where the United States as a colonial and imperial power can be keenly felt.