Finding Home: Paule Marshall’s “The Chosen Place, the Timeless People”

Yuri Stulov

doi:10.15388/respectus.2018.34.39.06

Abstract

[full article and abstract in English] The paper deals with the novel “The Chosen Place, the Timeless People” by Paule Marshall, one of the most significant precursors of the modern generation of African American women writers who were instrumental in voicing the concerns and aspirations of millions of black women. It develops some of the themes the writer addressed in her first novel “Brown Girl, Brownstones” and raises topical issues of power and domination, connections between the historical past and present, postcolonial mentality, individual and collective identity, racism, gender inequality, complex relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors, men and women in a male-dominated society, and women’s struggle for self-identification and self-determination. The novel was published in 1969, a critical year in the Civil Rights movement that paved the way for major changes in the social and political life of the United States, and signified the emergence of black feminist writing focusing on the female protagonist of mixed descent who challenges the accepted views and mores and helps to introduce the new awareness of what should be done to break with the miserable past.

Highlights

Over the last decades African American women’s writing has dominated in American literary studies, especially in the works of the American Feminist writers who have been extremely active on the academic scene
The Norton of African American Literature explains it by the fact that “Marshall’s first two novels as well as her stories of the 1960s were ahead of their time in that they clearly focused on the variety of black communities, and on black women, at a time when black cultural nationalism fostered a monolithic view of blacks as urban African American and male.” (The Norton 1997: 2051–2052)
The price, which African American women have to pay for becoming visible in American society, is enormous, and the writer is unsparing in showing how communal tyranny affects the maturation of her female characters

Summary

Introduction

Over the last decades African American women’s writing has dominated in American literary studies, especially in the works of the American Feminist writers who have been extremely active on the academic scene.

Results

Conclusion