Narrative as Renaissance: A Black Feminist Autoethnography in Gloria Naylor's 1996

Abstract

The paper makes an attempt to analyze the social-cum-political components of objectification of African American women in Gloria Naylor’s memoir 1996 (2005). The study endeavours to accentuate upon how the invasion of the authoritarian mainstream hegemonic-cum-stereotypical world order downgrades the lives of African American women to the  deepest of the pits, and constantly harks back at them to the point where they had to declare that their lives no longer belonged to them, but to those unfamiliar/familiar persons who followed them like a hellhound, eventually robbing them off their individualities as well as their privacies. By employing Black Feminist Standpoint as theory and autoethnography as methodology, the paper emphasizes on how, by amalgamating her actual life experiences with fictitious narrations, Naylor accentuates upon the besmirched and dishonoured status of Black women in America who are falsely blamed of being anti-Nationalist because of their colour, ultimately stripping off their identities and persecuting them to the point where they are forced to commit suicide. However, it is only when they receive support from a group of people with analogous encounters that they gather strength to combat with the mainstream power structures and construct their own standpoints.