Black Feminism In Margaret Walker's 'Jubilee'

women into consideration. It works in both the theoretical and activist ways to empower black women against the intersectionality of racism, sexism, gender and class oppression. It plays an active role in demystifying the various negative controlling images perpetrated against black women since slavery. The prominent images are mammy, matriarch, jezebel, sapphire and breeder woman. The paper is an attempt to analyse Margaret Walker’s neo-slave narrative Jubilee as presented from the perspective of slave women. It argues how the slave women resist the controlling images and lead an artistic life with values of humanism.
Keywords-Black feminism, slavery, controlling images.
Black feminism is a theoretical and activist stance against the intersectionality

While white women are believed to be virtuous, innocent, pure, chaste and goddess-like, black women are believed to be inherently promiscuous, lascivious and a sexual object. According to bell hooks, slave women were termed as “sexual temptress”, “sexual savage” and “sexual heathens” (33). In reality, they were sexually vulnerable from their adolescent years and suffered harsh punishment if they did not submit to the demands of the white men. While white women are treated as fragile and incapable of doing heavy work, black women are treated as mules which can be exploited to perform heavy labour. The grandmother Nanny in Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-1960) novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) says to the young Janie Crawford that “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (17). Their work performed as dehumanized mules is described by Patricia Hill Collins as “economically exploitative, physically demanding and intellectually deadening” (48). In the working sector, black men were not made to do womanly tasks whereas black females were made to work in the fields, perform household chores, become an animalistic breeder and suffer sexual assaults from white men. According to Angela Y.