i'm sorry, what did you call me--a badass?

SUSANNAH BARTLOW, CHAPTER UPDATE, OCTOBER 1, 2007
“Something’s telling me to open my heart: Alice Walker and the betrayal of tradition”

OUTLINE
1. African American radical spiritual narrative traditions

Beginning with autobiographical texts by Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, and (more famously) Maria Stewart, African American women preachers and evangelists argued for a radical redefinition of themselves through their spiritual revelations.

2. Conversion as a holistic self-recovery

Using Moody, Connor, and a number of other scholars, I explore what conversion does within The Color Purple and how it fits with this radical narrative tradition.

3. The model/shaman/healer/visionary role

4. Healing narratives: definition, differences from/with African American women’s traditions, TCP’s healing powers intra- and extra-textually. Using Wilentz as a major resource.

5. African American literary traditions
--Christian essay arguing self-definition as the key trope of late 20th century
--Walker’s own writings to recover and place herself, inspiring others, as part of the self-defining and authenticating tradition
--Jenkins article on black critical reception lying in part in heterosexism and the “salvific wish”
--Civil rights and activist issues (to be dealt with more extensively in chapter on Meridian & Bambara)

6. The turn to Native American and other spiritual sources

--Her canonization and the negative impact on her later work
--Black womanist ethics & theology
--The late 80s and early 90s transition
--Moral responsibility and the authenticity debate (Moody’s work is a reverse
argument of this)

7. Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: does the text work?

8. New Age quackery

9. Spiritual allegory and Buddhist spiritual narrative forms





ABSTRACT/SUMMARY
Alice Walker popularized the term “womanism” in her 1984 collection In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens and quickly became the public emblem for an exploding African American women’s literary movement. In one of the earliest volumes of black women’s criticism, 1985’s Conjuring, Marjorie Pryse declared Walker as the founding icon of an emerging literary movement: “[Zora Neale] Hurston planned the garden, but it would take Alice Walker to plant it” (15). Walker’s status as the canon of black women’s writing was cemented in the 1980s, when her radical updates to the two centuries of black women’s creative expression became canonized with the emergence of two related womanist fields: literary criticism and liberation theology. The Color Purple’s (1984) liberating vision for oppressed black women, its honesty about sexual abuse and healing, and its reimagining of southern Baptist spiritual life cemented Walker’s status as one of the two radical black women writers of the late 20th century to achieve household status.
Twenty years on, Walker has shifted from being an icon of black feminism to a New Age hack. 2004’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart was reviled as a text that wasted her literary gifts and her community responsibilities on spiritual parable. Walker’s contemporary novels are dismissed as unfortunate addenda to a stellar career. I want to revise this critical narrative by taking a look, not at what Walker’s later books lack in comparison with her more famous or well-received work, but at what they have in common: an eclectic spiritual vision that reckons with the legacy of civil rights and womanism through narratives that develop the characters through a spiritual, rather than material or political, reality.

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