African American womanism

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston's work in the woman-centered narrative, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), connects African American women's literary production in the second half of the twentieth century to African American women's literary production in the nineteenth century. Alice Walker epitomizes this connection in her acknowledgment of Hurston's significance in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), the volume prefaced by Walker's four-part womanist aesthetic. Critics and other readers recognize Walker's resurrection of Hurston's exuberant spirit in Shug Avery of The Color Purple (1982). Walker pays tribute to Hurston and other black foremothers who paved the way, even under the most difficult circumstances. She acknowledges, as well, the efforts of her sisters in struggle in the mid-twentieth-century social movements: “Women have, over the last twenty years, really forged a community of readers, writers, and activists. That is what we're seeing. We're seeing that feminists and womanists have actually come of age, so that we are able to talk to each other.”