Disempowerment to Emancipation: The 'Black Feminist Standpoint'Antidote of Female Bonding in Gloria Naylor'sThe Women of Brewster Place

Abstract

The paper endeavors to contextualize Black Feminist Standpoint in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and efficaciously attempts to raise social consciousness, through its exemplary narrative milieu, regarding the everyday struggles of Black womanhood, and humanize them at the intersections of multitudinous nomenclatures of oppression. The chapter ponders over the predicaments of African American women and their capacity to stand firm against the fake definitions of man and woman prevailing in the racist, classist, and sexist ideology which leads to their invisibilization, thus, ultimately associating their personal lives and experiences to their cultural undertakings, thereby employing subjective autoethnographic convictions as a pedagogical tool.  The study also provides a detailed scrutiny of the exploitive and brutal experiences of seven women protagonists, not only as a means of resistance but also as instrumental to building community and Black-sisterhood. The enduring descriptions of black-sisterhood, as an alternative matrix of kinship to revolt and fight back, engender a network fostering care, nurture, healing and combined survival.