Purpose of the study: The study aims to examine the concept of sisterhood as an emancipative endeavor to empower and free the Afro-American women in Alice Walker's (1942) novels: Meridian and the Color Purple, through the liberal treatment of Black Feminism.
Methodology: Qualitative research aims to form speculations or facts that are derived from secondary sources. It tries to understand Walker's liberal treatment of sisterhood, in the selected novels, through the radical black feminism, and the feminist liberal lens of bell hooks. The study considered other related critics and scholars to help further illuminate the emancipative notion of sisterhood. The study is a library-based drawn on literary and critical books and articles.
Main finding: The study clarifies the emancipative notion of hooks on Walker's feminist attitude of sisterhood in the selected novels as a privilege to enhance black women's growth and to strengthen the social bond to achieve women's liberation. Simultaneously, the study criticizes the Western oppressive authority as well as the traditional one-sided thinking of mainstream feminism. By a new and liberal reading of hooks' perspective, the study illuminates that the collective power and mass struggle of Afro-American women lead to self-realization and identity.
Implication: This study can be used by scholars and activists to understand how Afro-American women have been undergoing a long process of transformation by radical feminist thinking, from exploitation, domination, and oppression toward the center of social, political and cultural focus.
Originality/Novelty: A new reading of Walker's novels is utilized by the light of bell hooks' emancipative notion of sisterhood.
This study is an attempt at reading Jack Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans” in the light of the theory of Michel Foucault. “The Subterraneans”, written in 1958, grapples with the life of Leo, the alter ego of Jack Kerouac himself. The actions and interactions of its main characters, Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, are observed and analyzed, focusing on the political philosophy of Foucault, specifically his conceptions of power, power relations, institutions, and surveillance to shed light on the ideas of Kerouac, the spokesperson of the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s novel represents the spirit of the age of a people who sought change, difference, and disobedience; the main characters are antiheroes who challenge their prisonlike structure of the society. In contrast, the government has the upper hand by means of its distinct and overlapping institutions that not only neutralize such acts or resistances but make normal and ordinary those individuals who were themselves the promoters and examples of abnormality. Jack Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans” is characterized by unfreedom, obedience, unthinking men, individuals without individuality, and disillusionment.
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