Voodoo Feminism Through the Lens of Jewell Parker Rhodes's Voodoo Dreams

Abstract

The tradition of conjuring is well documented and discussed in African American literary discourse. Marjorie Pryse comments on Alice Walker's professed role in writing The Color Purple (1982), “If there is magic involved in Walker's perception of herself as a medium, it is women's magic, the origins of which are as old as women themselves—and which, in the Black community, has often taken other forms but has also taken literary expression” (2). In his article on Charles Chestnutt's Conjure Woman (1899), Eric Sellinger comments “on the limits authors like Chestnutt worked within and against—including, perhaps, the definitions of masculinity and femininity his conjure figures suggest” (667). Concerned with the early tradition of casting conjure women as “comic or demonic,” Lindsay Tucker argues that Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), “sees the conjure woman in need of textual restitution” (175). These scholars discern a relationship between gender and power—a relationship that emerges in the work of Jewell Parker Rhodes as well.