The Body as a Site of Colonization: Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy

Abstract

Imperialism is an economic, political, institutional, and cultural phenomenon that has been practiced by power elites in elation to the masses of the United States, especially in relation to Native Americans, blacks, women, and immigrant groups such as Asians. Although the term is generally used to describe the control of one nation over the political, cultural, or economic life of another, it may be extended to include internal, as well as external, colonialism. The colonial relationship is one of domination and subordination among groups and is constructed primarily on notions of difference; it is established and maintained in order to serve the interests of the dominant group, fortifying its position and eroding choice for non-elites through force, authority, influence, and dominance. Elites include those in positions of influence and power, i.e., those who have access to resources that enable them to dominate in the creation of policy and culture: religious, political, and economic leaders; educators; artists; publishers; and professional associations, such as the American Medical Association. The colonial relationship is not only physical, but psychic and cultural as well. Ideology occupies a dialectical relation to legislation, economics, and culture: it arises from and contributes to a system of exclusionary power relations. Those colonized have less access to resources as they are subordinated economically and politically; what resources they do have are tenuous as their bodies, which have become commodities, are dispensable in a surplus labor force. Imaging is one tool used to justify this exclusion and subordination, constructing those colonized as deserving of their lower status. For instance, Charles Murray's Model Minority thesis is used to image blacks as lazy and socially parasitic in comparison to model Asians; if they wanted to live up to their Lockean social contract and take individual responsibility for their welfare, they could. The only reason blacks form a disproportionate number of the unemployed is that they are just too lazy to go out and get a job; instead, they live off of whites. Such propaganda as this reinforces stereotypes conducive to retaining elites in power. Violence is often a result of such imaging; these stereotypes and ideologies often promote physical as well as psychic violence, such as low self-esteem and despair, within and against non-elites. Incidents such as those of Beenhard Goetz, Rodney King, Vincent Chin, Bensonhurst, and the Los Angeles riots are an (il)logical result. The image-making process is thus a vital part of how domination is (de)constructed. bell hooks and other authors agree that control over the image-making process is a vital part of systems of domination; while hooks specifically discusses racial domination, this is true for gender, sexual, and economic domination as well. Hegemonic discourse must therefore be disrupted and transformed as part of the process of decolonization; those who are dominated must be able to see themselves oppositionally, to imagine, describe, and invent ourselves in ways that are liberatory (Black Looks 2). For example, in order to fight against their economic status as the lowest paid workers in America and their status as the primary victims of sterilization abuse and abortion (Lorde 285), black women must take control of the image-making process as part of revolutionary activity. One example of this taking control is Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy; this text functions as an example of revolutionary action against the oppression of those colonized by the imperialist gaze. The female body and the African body are exposed as sites of colonization by power elites; the ritual of female genital mutilation and the AIDS epidemic are both imaged as means to oppression. However, in Walker's text these bodies also become sites of resistance to domination by power elites. In addition, the power relations in this text are not simplistically demarcated in a binary of colonized versus colonizer/good versus evil. …