Their Eye Were Watching God Sparknotes

The growing influence of the post-colonial agenda since the 1980‟s has resulted in the creative expression of voice which was till now silenced by the Western master narratives. The painstaking efforts of non-white women from the margins has brought cross-cultural and interracial discussions into the arena of academic feminist theorizing which was till now based on gender. One of the primary aims of third-world feminism was to reject homogenizing impulses of Western feminists who analyzed women issues purely with regard to gender. The prominent black theoretician Bell Hooks criticizes her contemporarian Betty Friedman (whose book The

Feminine Mystique had became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement) for giving only a one-dimensional

An eminent black feminist critic Patricia Hill Collins in her book Black Feminist Thought comments that the primary guiding principle of black feminism is a recurring humanistic vision.

She says:

Black feminism is a process of self-conscious struggle that empowers women and men to actualize a humanistic vision of community. Many African- American intellectuals have advanced the view that Black women‟s struggles are part of a wider struggle for human dignity and empowerment. Alice Walker‟s preference for the term „womanist‟ address this notion of the solidarity of humanity.

She describe the term as “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender”. According to her one is “womanist” when one is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male or female.” She further adds that. “…..the colored race is just a flower garden with every color flower represented. By redefining all people as “people of color,” she universalizes what are typically seen as individual struggles.

Alice Walker says that she replaces the term „feminist‟ with „womanist‟ because she wants

A black feminist or feminist of color from the black folk expression of mothers to female children,

“You‟re acting womanish”, i.e., like a woman…Interested in grown up doings…acting grown up. Being grown-up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression. “You‟re trying to be grown up” Responsible .In-charge.

Serious.

It is interesting to see how black women of Africa and Afro-America derive strength and inspiration from women-bonding and the way female creativity has been kept alive in the most adverse circumstances. Matrilineage has always been seen as a significant characteristic of feminism. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One‟s own says that “ the experiences of the mass is behind the single voice” (60) and she claims that she and other women writers “ think back through our mothers”(69). Similar is the opinion voiced by Alice Walker in her ground-breaking easy “In Search of Our Mother‟s Gardens‟ which has became an important text in the study of literary matrilineages. She extends the meaning of „mother‟ from her own biological mother to other female relatives and neighbors‟ and then to women of strength and significance from whom Walker feels that she has learned