Everyday narratives and black feminist liberation in select 1980s 1990s Black American Womens writings

Abstract

This thesis studies black women s everyday narratives in select works of black women s writings published in the 1980s and the 1990s in the United States of America (works by Audre Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Paule Marshall). It reads the everyday as a site of black feminist liberation from black feminine ontological erasure by anti-blackness and heteropatriarchy (a mode of racial oppression examined by Afro-pessimism), and black women s consequent connection to systems of negative signifiers and negative narratives of child-loss, black death, criminalization, hypersexuality, objectification and so on. It posits the everyday as harbouring black narratives : the narrative arcs wherein black (women) subjects detach themselves from the definitions, signifiers and narratives imposed on them by anti-black (and heteropatriarchal) society, and redefine themselves by connecting themselves to a black (feminist) vocabulary based on a black (feminist) ontology. Through these black narratives, the everyday aids the black women in their collective ontological affirmation. This thesis also examines how black women forge interpersonal relationships with other black women through their everyday lives, exchange affirmative signifiers with each other, and connect their black narratives together to form relational narrative networks. The thesis understands the production of black narratives and the ontological affirmation of black women in the primary texts as indicative of their rhizomatic structure. newlineThrough a black Feminist-Womanist-inspired quilt methodology involving multiple theoretical approaches, this thesis examines the specific effects, narratives and signifying systems of anti-blackness and heteropatriarchy on black women in the following core arenas of everyday black existence: spatiality, maternity, same-sex intimacy, and materiality. It also reads the various ways the everyday allows black women to liberate themselves from these specific kinds of anti-black and heteropatriarchal oppression, collectively