Black Female Character Research Articles

Black Women’s Revolt in the Struggle for Freedom: An Exploration of Toni Morrison’s Selected Novels

This research work is about black women’s contribution in the struggle for black freedom in America as dramatized in Toni Morrison’s works. Drawing from the New Historicism, the psychological and sociological approaches which allow to enlighten a literary text within its socio-historical dimension, it purports to highlight strategies of revolt settled by black female characters against social injustices and discrimination in order to integrate the American society. The exploration of the selected narratives evidences the manifestations of black women’s struggle for black freedom; a revolt related to the history of America with abolitionists like Harriet Tubman called by ‘black Moses,’ Harriet Jacobs, Rosa Park to quote only some. Being the most vulnerable for ages in the practice of slavery, black women revolted and involved themselves into concrete actions to claim not only their identity as black people but also the right to be considered human beings as white people in the American soil. To get rid of the white system of slavery, black women inner motivation of revolt has been expressed by the psychological awake allowing them to act for their identity and freedom. This study finally shows not only the involvement of black women in the struggle for black freedom, but also the black women power in conflict regulation testimonies of which are substantial in the history of America.

Reese Witherspoon’s popular feminism: adaptation and authorship in Big Little Lies

ABSTRACT Through her programmes, including Big Little Lies (2017–2019), The Morning Show (2019–), and Little Fires Everywhere (2020), Reese Witherspoon has been central to the recent rise of women-centric television. Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, and her book club, Reese’s Book Club, aim to ‘shine a light’ on women’s work, vocalising an explicitly feminist approach to authorship and adaptation. Identifying Witherspoon’s politics as a form of popular feminism, this article uses Big Little Lies (BLL) as a case study to investigate the various strategies Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine deploy to articulate this feminism. Identifying sisterhood as a key strategy, this article points to the limits of popular feminism by revealing who is excluded from this female collective: director Andrea Arnold, whose creative control was allegedly undermined when directing BLL’s second season; and BLL’s Black female characters, who are narratively excluded from this construction. This article, then, calls for feminist critics to be attentive to the selective and exclusionary nature of popular feminism in television as it obscures the material conditions of women working in television production roles and the sexist and racist structures governing women’s representations.

Female Bonding in Sula and The Women of Brewster Place : A Freedom Nest Threatened by Patriarchal Institutions and Social Perceptions.

In Sula, Toni Morrison paints the marvels of female friendship in the American society where race, class and gender define Black women’s lot. Personified through the characters of Sula and Nel, Morrison pictures how togetherness alleviates the young girls’ social burdens and consolidates their selves despite their distinct personalities. In The Women of Brewster Place, through seven stories, Gloria Naylor portrays women’s bonding in its different shapes as their redeemer in defiance of the social, psychological and economic conditions in the Black community. In both novels, Naylor and Morrison represent female bonding in its dynamic as Black women’s healer in the African American community where they are subjected to oppression because of their position as the other of an “other”. However, the two authors draw particular attention toward men’s destructive social power embodied in institutions like marriage but also how women’s tendency to homogenize the black female characters’ self-definition hinders their empowerment. Both authors’ views of the assets of female community are confirmed by the recent conditions of African-American women. Nevertheless, the query remains on how far togetherness drives Black women in their way to empowerment in America.

The Appalling Tragedy: Sexuality, Beauty Standard, and Racism in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Being about the tragic lives of African American black families who encounter traumatic circumstances, the novel The Bluest Eye especially focuses on the unbearable life of a little black girl, Pecola. The horrible atmosphere of the novel can be seen from the beginning pages. It is heart-wrenching to see from the beginning pages of the novel that a young girl is raped by her father; consequently, she is pregnant. Pecola is so severely affected by the traumatic events such as the racial discrimination, internalized ugliness as being black, whiteness as the accepted beauty standard, and sexual abuse by her father that in the end, she goes mad and hallucinates a dream friend seeing her blue eyes. As a child, she associates blackness with the burden of her life and she considers that having blue eyes would be the solution to all her sufferings. Moreover, other black male and female characters such as Frieda, Claudia, Cholly, Darleine, Paulina are affected by the racism, sexual abuse, beauty standard, discrimination, and humiliation in the society. They have an internalized belief of blackness and ugliness; for this reason, they believe they experience poverty and discrimination. The aim of this paper is to discuss the traumatic tragedy caused by beauty standards, sexual abuse, and racism.

“Have you got any soul?”: reinterpreting High Fidelity’s relationship to Black cultural production

ABSTRACT This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine the interpersonal dynamic between Rob and Cherise in High Fidelity (Hulu 2020), two Black female characters at the center of a gender- and race-flipped TV remake of Nick Hornby’s (1995) novel and Stephen Frears’s (2000) film. It centers Cherise in the frame by examining how she opposes her secondary status as a supporting character with her undervalued critical and creative acumen, traits she shares with her white male literary and cinematic counterparts but activates differently as a Black woman. It situates Cherise and actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s interpretation of the source material through the practice of cover singing. Though covers are often dismissed as unoriginal, reinterpretation is particularly useful for Black female performers who transform other peoples’ songs as a tactic against artistic marginalization, one that allows them to critique institutional racism and sexism. This acuity implicates the media industries’ limited imagination for Black female characters and the performers who bring them to life. Thus, Cherise and Randolph reveal the work ahead to bring Black female characters into focus by embellishing the margins of a story and challenging an adaptation process that was not designed to center them.

At her pleasure: Black women writing sexual desire

Black women’s bodies and sexualities have particularly been exposed and spoken about in public spaces from an outsider perspective. In this essay, I ground the exploration of sexual pleasure as described and imagined by Black female characters in contemporary short stories written by Black French women. I examine three short stories from the anthology Volcaniques: Une anthologie du Plaisir (2015) by Gisèle Pineau, Léonora Miano, and Hemley Boum to explore how these writers complicate, expand, and subvert heteronormative notions of pleasure, and seek it via their Black female characters. Instead of further silencing Black women’s sexuality for fear of reinscribing hypersexual tropes, or reiterating narratives of trauma and unhappy sexualities, these narratives reclaim women’s bodies and sexualities for their pleasures. I take an intersectional and afrofeminist approach to underscore the different forms of sexual (and other forms of) pleasure for middle-class Black French women. These narratives prove to be a mirror for other Black women who read and experience pleasure as well as a window to the variety of ways they experience and write about (sexual) pleasure and desire. Ultimately, beyond body and sexual positivity, by writing about these sexual matters, these compelling narratives lay claim to the humanity of middle-class Black women.

Revisiting Characters in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Binarism, Trauma and Resilience

For decades, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) has been subject to different readings and interpretations. Transcending the boundaries of time and place, Conrad’s novella is still a relevant text for modern critical readings. Although many critics have studied characters referring to different theories and perspectives, characterization is still a rich source of meaning. This paper aims to study the characters in Heart of Darkness and examine Conrad’s narrative strategy in terms of binarism and doubling. The paper also explores how, despite their depiction as powerful characters, Marlow and Kurtz show symptoms of failure and trauma while the black female character, usually depicted as an emblem of absence and negation, shows signs of power and resilience despite her muteness and minor presence. Feminist, Psychoanalytical and trauma theories are referred to in the revisiting of characters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

Modernity and Personal Experiments in Walker’s The Color Purple (1982)

Women in the modern era have been defined as being revolutionary and opposed to the traditional representation of their lives. Alice Walker (February 1944-) a Pulitzer Prize-winning figure is an African-American novelist, critic and poet who has vigorously defended women's modernist innovations and African American civil rights in her works. Her novel The Color Purple (1982) explores the African American female experience through the life and struggles of the narrator of the novel. What distinguishes The Color Purple is the very feature of psychological state of the heroine whilst struggling for her minimal rights of being a woman and black. The heroine of the novel Celie is revolutionary and anti-traditional. Walker planted her own personal experience within The Color Purple through the sufferings and traumatic life of the female characters.Walker through “Womanism”, a term coined by herself representing Black feminism, combines critical elements in The Color Purple, namely the importance of black history and heritage and the centrality of female creativity and competence in that heritage, which are often symbolized by quilts, sisterhood, liberation, self-identity, double consciousness and other symbols. Further through exhibiting African American woman’s twice-oppressed state, as they were double-discriminated racially and sexually by Americans, on the one hand by white Americans, on the other, by their fellow black male counterparts. The epistolary style of The Color Purple is probably an essential feature of modern literary output. The letters are used to manifest Celie and other characters’ lives to readers. Furthermore, within The Color Purple, Walker employs the very modern African American literary feature which is “Neo-Slave Narrative”. Through Neo-Slave Narrative, she displays her black female characters’ still-enslaved status in the modern era to form a juxtaposition between narrations of her fellow oppressed black women and Slave-Narrations of enslaved African Americans like Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner truth.

Black African American and the Reality of Racism in Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville

Gwendolyn Brooks has become the doubly disadvantaged poet, mostly because of her as a black woman, and secondly, by consideration for her gender. Such a double pressure is evident in Brooks's poetry. For her race and culture, Brooks took great pride as well as supports, honors womanhood too. However, Brooks's poetry discusses black consciousness and also exposes the essence of the concerns of black women. The Black women, their psychological state as well as their depressed feelings are portrayed in Brooks's poetry. The goal of Brooks is to show the readers, what African American women should be. The major aspect is that women characters are independent women, who reject the boundaries of the appropriate role, by both the Blacks as well as the general Western society. The suffering and resentment of American blacks, the misery with the strength of ordinary black citizens, is brilliantly pointed out by Brooks. She concentrated through her poems on people in general and women in particular. Although, she depicts African American women as moms, wives, sisters, girlfriends, as well as daughters, in different ways. Undoubtedly, Black female characters for Brooks are still victims of racism, slavery, sexism, exploitation, discrimination, injustice, oppression, and violence.

RACIAL INEEUQALITY AND SEXIST OPPRESSION IN TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED

AbstractThis study examines the construction of racialized society and gendered identities in fictional text of Morrison's Beloved. The research aim is to analyze and explore how these identities are constructed in Beloved by using a feminist approach. We find that the imposed ideal of femininity is absorbed and patriarchy is assumed. Female’s black characteristics are repressed both intra-communally and inter-communally. In the former, black female characters are not ‘fitted’ to white femininity as they strive for identity crisis even among the blacks. In the latter, they are whim of male dominance-subject of incest, rape and seduction. Though, women are doubly repressed, it is not the racial discrimination that threatens and jeopardizes black women identity rather a sheer domination of patriarchal power from within and without exaggerating debasing women life among the whites. Therefore, this paper reflects on the manifestation of femininity and patriarchy in a radicalized society and how these two interact in women life in Morison's Beloved.

THE PORTRAYAL OF DISCRIMINATION TOWARDS FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE HIDDEN FIGURES MOVIE

This research discussed the issues of discrimination occurred toward the black female characters in The Hidden Figures movie. It aimed to describe the types of discrimination and to explain the impacts toward the black female characters. The researcher used the qualitative research as the method and feminist literary criticism as the approach of this research. The data derived from narrations and dialogues in the movie script related to the research questions. The findings of this research showed that there were two types of discrimination portrayed in the movie; those are derogation and denial. The findings also showed that the impacts of discrimination toward black female characters emerged in psychological and economic fields.

Heads of the Colored People, de Nafissa Thompson-Spires: subjetividades femininas negras em diálogo

Este artigo aborda a literatura afro-americana feminina por meio da coletânea de contos Heads of the Colored People, de Nafissa Thompson-Spires, publicada originalmente em 2018. As narrativas nesse livro, que perpassam questões étnico-raciais, retratam uma multiplicidade de vivências de sujeitos negros nos Estados Unidos na atualidade. Em primeiro lugar, são apresentadas algumas considerações sobre construção de identidades, especialmente em relação a mulheres negras. Em seguida, é proposta uma análise dos contos “Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story” e “The Body’s Defenses Against Itself” com o objetivo de verificar de que modos se constroem as subjetividades da protagonista Fatima a partir de diálogos consigo mesma e com outras personagens femininas negras.

Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema by Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber

Reviewed by: Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema by Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber Muriel Cormican Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber. Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema. Northwestern UP, 2020. 197 pp. Paper, $34.95. The central task of Precarious Intimacies is, in Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber’s words, “to recognize, affirm, and value intimacies, love, touch, [End Page 136] and care while at the same time challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which they are embedded” (5). Within the analytic frameworks of feminist and critical race studies, they propose a theoretical construct and perform readings that deploy it as a diagnostic lens. Although they use this lens to access and explore important, contradictory elements of a contemporary Western European cinematic practice that centers questions of otherness and belonging, it is a lens that, if applied to any imaginative text, will yield multidimensional understandings. Reading for precarious intimacies emphasizes moments of connection, care, and solidarity while not ignoring the structural violence that often still informs them: the European Union’s regimes of exclusion, imbricated as they are in discourses of racialization and othering, for example. A significant advantage of the concept is its insistence on the persistence of ambivalences and ambiguities in uplifting and distressing narratives. In chapter 1 the authors analyze four filmic stories of non-arrival that highlight how Europe functions as a “happy place,” a draw, while simultaneously underscoring the unhappy effects its border policing has on immigrants and refugees. Chapter 2 explores literal moments of touch in four films, showing how touch across difference disrupts conventional narratives of belonging and points to Europe’s continued dependence on normative structures despite its self-understanding as a place of enlightened inclusion. Chapter 3 focuses on how Karin Albou’s films depict women who rely on conceptualizations from their faith to build bridges, making non-Christian religions part of rather than the antithesis to an inclusive Europe. Chapter 4 deals with commodified intimacies between white European men and Black or Brown non-European women and offers an insightful investigation of how choice functions in systems that limit control and bind people to problematic power dynamics. The films “show moments where, in spite of these economies, intimacies develop that run counter to determined paths” (120). The commodified intimacies examined in chapter 5 are between white, European women and Black, non-European men. Here, the authors argue, solidarity remains unattainable, and the films invite empathy for the plight of white women, minimizing the precarity and plight of Black male characters and practically erasing Black female characters. Stehle and Weber demonstrate how these latter depictions reveal limits to the analytic tool they call precarious intimacies. Concluding that reading for care and connection cannot become too positive, they nonetheless underscore that “in the face of all that is and can go wrong, we can and must envision [End Page 137] different outcomes that imagine intimacy as sustenance, solidarity, and collaboration” (153). Precarious Intimacies opens up new and complex avenues for considering the representation of immigration in imaginative texts of any kind and from any context and reminds readers to remain alert for unconscious bias, racializing discourses, and exclusionary othering. The analyses and readings are convincing and important. Because Stehle and Weber have so effectively created a critical space that generates questions, I am left with some. I wonder, for example, if the empathy generated for white women in the films analyzed in the final chapter is not also elicited for white men in films analyzed earlier, in Welcome (Lioret, 2007), for example. Chapter 1 left me asking what a more direct analysis of masculinity might contribute to comprehending the experience of those who never even make it to the border. For me, Michael Winterbottom’s decision to pass over the experience of young girls in In This World (2002) and to make that of boys representative begs for attention. Is it relevant that solidarities and community seemed impossible in a very particular instance—white women and Black men from outside Europe? In short, could gender be further deployed as a category of analysis to emphasize the intersectionality the authors address throughout...

PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THEMES IN TONI MORISON’S THE BLUEST EYE THROUGH INFERIORITY COMPLEX

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) is one of the controversial modern American novels. She is a Noble Prize winner whose works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism and colour issue in America. The story is written during 1941, the Great Depression in which a black family suffers from poverty, colour skin, and familial issues. Pecola Breedlove, as the protagonist, suffers from Inferiority Complex in a dysfunctional family whose desire is to have white skin and blue eyes. The inferiority complex theory was taken from Alfred Adler, whose works are significantly backbone in the world of psychology. The aims of this research are to analyse the personality of Pecola through which she searches for an ideal beauty as a black female character in the novel and to demonstrate the impact of racist attitude and incestuous relationship within a family. The research result shows that Pecola’s lives provide an example of the pain which results from facing Inferiority Complex on which she never sees herself as a complete image of being. It is somewhat broken and lacks self-esteem through which she was seen as a mad woman in the attic.

Dandara dos Palmares: uma proposta para introduzir uma heroína negra no ambiente escolar

Várias protagonistas negras, como Dandara dos Palmares, foram excluídas da História oficial do Brasil contada em nossas escolas, resultante não só do racismo, dentre vários fatores, mas também do machismo e do sexismo ainda existente em nossa sociedade. Como uma de suas consequências está a falta de identificação das meninas afrodescendentes com personagens femininas negras. Assim, este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar uma proposta de atividade pedagógica a partir da divulgação da trajetória dessa grande heroína do Quilombo dos Palmares e baseada no livro As Lendas de Dandara, da escritora e cordelista Jarrid Arraes. O trabalho tem como intuito valorizar os feitos e a memória de Dandara, contribuindo para a construção da identidade das crianças negras enquanto afrodescendentes, bem como para a inclusão da diversidade étnico-racial nas salas de aula.

“I was Anti-Everything”: Cartoonist Jackie Ormes and the Comics as a Site of Progressive Black Journalism

“I was Anti-Everything”: Cartoonist Jackie Ormes and the Comics as a Site of Progressive Black Journalism H. Zahra Caldwell (bio) In 1953, cartoonist Jackie “Zelda” Ormes was featured in the One Tenth of a Nation Newsreel series. She was shown in her studio meticulously drawing her popular comics. This short film was put out by All-American Newsreel, a company that produced some of the only Black newsreels in the twentieth century. They would be shown nationwide at the start of feature films. The One Tenth series featured fourteen prominent African Americans and was an attempt to recognize African American contributions during the 1950s.1 By this time, Ormes’s comic strips reached millions weekly and she had created one of the first Black, mass-marketed dolls, modeled after fictional Patty Jo from her widely circulated Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger strip. Ormes’s characters would become so popular that by 1948, when asked what he might take with him to a desert island, writer Langston Hughes declared, “I would miss . . . Jackie Ormes’s cute drawings.”2 Ormes’s inclusion in the film, as well as Hughes’s reference, signaled the status she had earned in the Black press and Black popular culture. When this film was produced Ormes was approaching the zenith of her twenty-year career as a cartoonist in Black newspapers. This made her the longest running, most syndicated Black woman cartoonist, a record still unchallenged in the modern day. Ormes’s comics are not simply vehicles for easy laughs; they exist as powerful sites of Black feminist radical clapbacks and pointed societal interrogations. The erasure and marginalization of Black women’s artistic, intellectual, and activist labor within histories of the twentieth century will come as no surprise to the reader. Thankfully, these contributions are being steadily unearthed. Scholars such as Mia Bey, Farrah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and [End Page 99] Barbara D. Savage in their collection Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women and Brittany C. Cooper in her work Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Ayesha K. Hardison’s Writing Through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature, among many others, have provided a critical overview of this work by African American women.3 Yet we must continue to expand our definitions of both intellectual and activist labor. Black comics, and in Ormes’s case, Black women cartoonists occupy a marginalized space in art and activism. Her comics work to upend this marginalization. Her strips are an example of Black women’s astute evaluations of the world around them and the interior and exterior challenges mounted to survive them. Her comics provide a valuable unvarnished critique of American life and inequity at midcentury using the voices and bodies of Black female characters. Decades after her strips ran, Ormes exclaimed to an interviewer, “Me, I was always fighting battles, I was antiwar—I was anti-everything-that’s-smelly!”4 Due to the lack of a formal or informal Ormes archive, her personal politics are hard to discern in full. What is clear, however, is that she was involved in groups characterized as radical in different capacities, and the worldview she articulated in the few interviews she granted could also be considered radical for the time. However, her comics speak in a clear radical voice and her fight was on display within the pages of the Black press, in a most overlooked place—the funny pages. I hope to add to the important work on Ormes begun by other scholars. Researcher Nancy Goldstein provides the most comprehensive text on Ormes. Her groundbreaking book, Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist, gives an overview of her prodigious creative production and her larger life. The widest collection of her comics is collected here, as well as the sole interviews with her then-living relatives.5 Literary scholar Edward Brunner discusses the exceptionalism of Ormes’s Black female characters in his article, “‘Shuh! Ain’t Nothin’ To It’: The Dynamics of Success in Jackie Ormes’s ‘Torchy Brown.’”6 American Studies scholar Deborah Elizabeth Whaley dedicates a chapter to Ormes in Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and...

The Birth of a Black Female Superhero in "Watchmen" (2019)

The article analyzes the development of a Black female superhero character in HBO’s Watchmen (2019) series. Inspired by Adilifu Nama’s “critically celebratory perspective” used to discuss Black superheroes, it focuses on how the show bridges the gender gap in representation of Black superheroes by introducing a strong female character in her thirties, how it deals with themes of racial discrimination, and how it offers a portent of racial utopia within the context of US history, culture, and politics. Furthermore, the analysis includes a reference to Alan Moore’s original comic of the same title and argues that through the Afrofuturistic aesthetic, the show transforms the disappointing white male superhero narrative into a potential story of success of the Black female superhero, making Angela a rightful heir to Doctor Manhattan’s superpower and perhaps someone who will be capable of making a change both in terms of a cultural and political change.

Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara's: Gorilla, My Love

Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara'sGorilla, My Love Aria S. Halliday (bio) Black women's literature positions resistance as one of the most important aspects of a Blacka woman's experience.1 Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde illuminate the connections between identity formation and resistance, especially in relation to patriarchal and heteronormative attitudes towards relationships and gender norms. For Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, resistance within mother/daughter relationships, as well as resistance to ancestral and community expectations, are at the center of Black female characters' experiences. Although included in Black literary constellations alongside Morrison and Walker, Toni Cade Bambara's shorter works have been anthologized without much criticism dedicated to her depictions of young Black women and resistance within the Black community. This article, then, focuses on Toni Cade Bambara's use of young Black girl protagonists as resistive characters who critique societal and intraracial issues in her short stories. Primarily, I feature Scout and Squeaky, two Black girl protagonists in Toni Cade Bambara's short stories "Gorilla, My Love" and "Raymond's Run." As girls who are assertive, willing to fight, and outspoken, Scout and Squeaky illustrate how communities and families infuse their girls with strategies to resist. Utilizing a Black feminist interpretation of James Scott's "everyday forms of resistance," I argue that Scout and Squeaky's feistiness is rooted in resistive [End Page 50] families and communities who reject normative aged, gendered, and racialized performances of girlhood.2 In doing so, I highlight how Bambara resituates feistiness as a necessary attribute created and secured in communities in the civil rights cultural moment of the 1960s and 1970s.3 This article contextualizes Black girls against traditional tropes of girls, challenging how Black girls have been made invisible because of their particular racialized experiences. I then turn to Bambara's characterizations of Squeaky and Scout to illustrate how "bad" Black girls cultivate feistiness as a survival skill. Lastly, I explore how feistiness could underlie "strong Black woman" stereotypes proliferated in popular culture that Black women confront daily. Despite their mischaracterizations, strength for Black girls is rooted in resistive communities and is necessary to promote the creativity, self-determination, and feistiness required of a world that constantly criminalizes and demonizes Black women and girls. Is She Really Bad? Racializing Bad Girl Tropes Previous scholarly work on Toni Cade Bambara has focused on her longer works, such as The Salt Eaters or three stories featured in the 1970 collection Gorilla, My Love: "The Lesson," "The Hammer Man," and "My Man Bovanne."4 Although Bambara has been anthologized as an author who centers African American culture and vernacular expression in her narratives, Nancy Hargrove implies that she is less often recognized as a young adult fiction writer like Twain, Joyce, and Salinger.5 Likewise, I have found that Bambara's writing has rarely been explored for her attention to Black girlhood. I contend, however, that Bambara positions girls as prominent actors in their communities. Set in the urban North, Gorilla, My Love contains fifteen short stories that explore Black families and love relationships. Many of Bambara's stories use a young girl protagonist or a representative character named Hazel. Although different in each narrative, Hazel, as a recurring character throughout the collection, provides literary continuity to feistiness as an important motif for Bambara. Moreover, Bambara's depictions of Black girlhood feistiness restructure normative conceptions of childhood because she resists simple characterizations of children as innocent or invisible. In traditional girlhood studies scholarship, the bad girl trope positions a girl who is angry, aggressive, and sexually active at the outskirts of society and community.6 Her isolation further fuels her anger, which incites her bad behavior. Marion Brown explains that white girls in literature who are considered aggressive or nonconformist are representatives of the bad girl trope—in addition to the sad girl who has low self-esteem and [End Page 51] strained relationships with women and the mad girl who adopts punk rock aesthetics and performativity to rebel—and are demonized for their "masculine" behaviors.7 However, these characterizations privilege narrow...

Fish Out of Water: Black superheroines in Nnedi Okorafor's <em>Lagoon</em>

Fish Out of Water:Black superheroines in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon Dr. Nedine Moonsamy (bio) She swims around the alien home that was in the water … they could not stay underwater for a long time, they could not breathe it as she could –Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon opens with a swordfish narrator who watches aliens while they populate the Nigerian waters. Unlike the narrator, who is entirely at home in the ocean, the aliens cannot breathe water with the same ease because, like the two black female protagonists in the novel, Ayodele and Adaora, the aliens are amphibian-like in nature. As the novel proceeds, Ayodele and Adaora's amphibian bodies become increasingly suggestive of the tentative navigation of spaces that they do not necessarily inhabit. My sense is that this oxymoronic habitation of an "alien home" alludes to that which is both strange and familiar, and so performs a metatextual mapping of the precarious space that black women more generally occupy in science fiction. As Mae G. Henderson observed "the complex situatedness of the black woman as not only the 'other'of the same, but also as the 'other' of the other(s)" implies "a relationship of difference and identification with the 'other(s)'." Because oppressive representations of black women in literature stem from both racialized and gendered discourse, she argues that multiple sites of othering must be interpolated and interrupted in black women's writing. This is equally true of science fiction, where race and gender discourses can often work at cross-purposes in wanting to produce alternative and affirmative narratives for black female characters. The importance of Lagoon, however, is that it is more self-conscious in this regard and plays with our expectations of science fiction superheroines by marking ideological and representative failures that arise in relation to black women. It thus follows that in wanting to [End Page 175] retain the integrity of the black female subject, Okorafor insists on the tentative abode of an "alien home" that operates both within and against the wider generic frameworks of popular science fiction. In his monograph, In Search of the Black Fantastic, scholar Richard Iton argues that popular culture is, by definition, a nonblack culture-a series of hegemonic tastes that rely heavily on the identification of the other that, in the American context, was achieved through the production of the negro. This is not to suggest that black characters do not appear in popular arts and culture, but rather that the abundant stereotypes of blackness exist only as counterfoils to the neutrality of normative whiteness. Somewhat ironically, the range of available signifiers for blackness is an excess that renders the black experience invisible. According to author Michelle Reid, this invisibility of black experience occurs in science fiction, where early space exploration stories were "narrated by the inheritors of advancement, often assumed to be white, Western, and on an adventure." Consequently, the genre became susceptible to various colonial and imperialistic fantasies that captured a troubled relationship to women, people of colour and nature by using the figure of the alien to symbolise these others. Nevertheless, in "Becoming Animal in Black Women's Science Fiction," Madhu Dubey explains that "although science fiction perhaps more than any other genre traffics in otherness, its conventions strongly discourage direct representations of that which is alien to humanity. The alien is typically encountered, comprehended, and subsumed by a human perspective; rarely (if ever) is the alien the subject of narration." Science fiction is replete with feminised or racialized robots aliens and monsters, however, they are always othered and the narrative requires that their otherhood be rendered benign through a process of masculine purging or consumption. Consequently, the question remains—what does it mean for a black artist to engage in contemporary popular culture? For Iton, the solution is to lend visibility to the black experience by engaging the fantastic that sits on the margins of popular culture. Black self-narration must then take on surreal dimensions and embrace the art of making strange. Hence, it is a search for blackness in a "minor key" where, much like the surrealists, the engagement with popular culture...