Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose is a collection composed of 36 separate pieces written by Alice Walker. The essays, articles, reviews, statements, and speeches were written between 1966 and 1982.[1] Many are based on her understanding of "womanist" theory. Walker defines "womanist" at the beginning of the collection as "A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender."[2]
alice walker womanist essay
Alice Walker's womanist credo seems exemplified in the words and the passions of Shug. Walker's literature and life work have been an expression of splendor and love of life. But they have also arisen from Walker's immersion in the stuff of lamentation, outcry, blues. Since the 1960s, when she was a civil rights activist, to the 1990s, when she has become a spokesperson for women subjected to ritual genital mutilation and Earth subjected to waste and depredation, Walker has spoken for life and flourishing and loving kindness through poetry, short stories, novels, essays, journals, feature film, and documentary. As critic Donna Haisty Winchell has written: "Walker has indeed come to see her work as prayer. She still believes, as she did when she wrote Once [her first book, poems], that poetry saves lives."(3) For Walker, life is art is political statement is rescue mission is prayer. It is all, in some way, lovemaking -- and earthy.
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is Alice Walker's 1983 collection of 36 essays composed from 1966 and 1982. At the start of the collection, Walker coins the term "womanist", which refers to a black feminist or other feminist of color. The text can therefore be counted among the foundational texts of "intersectional feminism", which explores the oppression of woman of color at the intersection of race, class, and sex.
What is a womanist? Alice Walker sets out to define the concept in this anthology of early essays and other nonfiction pieces. As she outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. As a writer, Walker has always taken such people as her primary subjects, and her search for paths toward self-possession and freedom always holds out hope for the transformative power of compassion and love. Whether she's taking on nuclear proliferation, the promise and problems of the civil rights movement, or her own creative process, Walker always brings to bear a fearless determination to tell the truth.
Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is a collection of Alice Walker's essays, reviews, statements, articles and speeches. Much of the writing expands on her "womanist" theory, in which Walker defines a "womanist" as a black feminist, or feminist of color.
The autobiographical essays of Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) range in subject from the civil rights movement to the writer Flannery O'Connor to discussions of beauty and childbearing. The book discovers and articulates a black feminist sentiment and tradition Walker calls "womanist." Walker recovers the work of African American women artists, locating art in the quilts and gardens of mothers and grandmothers, and reclaims writers, particularly black women writers, whose writing had been distorted or entirely ignored. It was in part due to this book that Their Eyes Were Watching God was elevated from a forgotten book to a near-canonical text.
How Alice Walker Created Womanism-The Movement that Meets Black Women Where Feminism Misses the Mark Rahatt, Camille 2020, Blavity -original/how-alice-walker-created-womanism-the-movement-that-meets-black-women-where-feminism-misses-the-mark 2ff7e9595c
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