| Kinship ties is a crucial concept in Afrocentric Womanist tradition as exemplified in the works of African American women writers. Critics are only beginning to suggest a literary tradition among African American women writers which incorporates among its metatheories communal ties as an integral component. In their insistence upon community and their emphasis on kinship ties, African American women writers use their creative talents to reconstruct the foremother's life for healing and reaffirmation.; Though I use theories from mainstream feminist studies, I incorporate these and subsume them under the principles of Afrocentricity as I maintain that Afrocentric Womanism is an activist praxis and a crucial part of the African American woman's experience. Initially transmitted orally, this praxis is an important aspect of the African American woman's literary tradition. Thus oral and written traditions have converged and Afrocentric Womanism informs the writings of African American women and is present in the slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, written in the nineteenth century. I posit Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as Ur-text for the Afrocentric womanist praxis exemplified in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jubilee, The Women of Brewster Place, and Beloved.; My understanding of Afrocentricity with its power to center the individual in terms of his/her race comes from my reading of Molefi K. Asante's The Afrocentric Idea. I fuse this term with Womanism as it is articulated by Alice Walker as a historical presence in both the oral and written tradition of the African American woman's experience. |
