Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature.

Abstract

Moorings Metaphors is one of the first studies to examine the ways that cultural tradition is reflected in the language figures of black women's writing. In a discussion that includes the works of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ntozake Shange, Buchi Emecheta, Octavia Butler, Efua Sutherland, Gayl Jones, with a particular focus on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Flora Nwapa's Efuru, Holloway follows the narrative structures, language, figurative metaphors of West African goddesses African-American ancestors as they weave through the pages of these writers' fiction. She explores what she would call the cultural gendered essence of contemporary literature that has grown out of the African diaspora. Proceeding from a consideration of the imaginative textual languages of contemporary African-American West African writers, Holloway asserts the intertextuality of black women's literature across two continents. She argues the subtext of culture as the source of metaphor language, analyzes narrative structures linguistic processes, develops a combined theoretical/critical apparatus vocabulary for interpreting these writers' works. The cultural sources spiritual considerations that inhere in these textual languages are discussed within the framework Holloway employs of patterns of revision, (re)membrance, recursion--all of which are vehicles for expressive modes inscribed at the narrative level. Her critical reading of contemporary black women's writing in the United States West Africa is unique, radical, sure to be controversial.