Race, gender and desire: Narrative strategies and the production of ideology in the fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker

This study examines the relationship of narrative techniques and strategies of representation to the production of ideology in the fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Its theoretical explorations and readings explore their narratives as loci of attempted synthesis of two often conflictual discourses: one related to the politics of race, the other to that of gender.; Chapters I and II focus on the social and political contexts of the writers' works. Black Aesthetics texts of the 1960's are examined as discursive formations that foreground racial opposition and difference through complex modes of semiosis, symbolic inversion and self-representation. In contrast, Black feminist cultural practices involve complex counter-discursive practices which deconstruct that discourse and foreground a Black female subject.; Chapters III through V provide critical readings of some of the writers' works. In Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, the privileging of literariness and the semiotic construction of an "authentic Black community" displace and repress feminine/feminist desire. The apparent textual dominant, representation of a "realistic" Black community, in Bambara's Gorilla, My Love, is disrupted and subverted by a submerged text that inserts a questioning and challenging young female subject, and the Black female subject of The Seabirds Are Still Alive is ambivalent, torn between commitment to nationalist ideology and self-empowerment. Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian inscribe tensions between two fictional narrations of Afro-American history: the traditional narratives of racial oppression and the genealogical discourse that addresses the oppression of Black women.; The final chapter discusses postmodern narrative strategies in the writers' recent novels. Among issues explored are the use of an interrogative textual mode and inscription of feminist issues in Tar Baby, appropriation and subversion of the epistolary genre underpinning the feminist ideological project in The Color Purple, and radical modes of narration and representation that result in displacement of nationalist ideology and the direct articulation of Black feminist issues in The Salt Eaters.