Gloria Naylor’s colours in the patchwork quilt of African American fiction

Abstract

The following chapters will explore and identify Naylor's key concerns and the issues she grapples with as a feminist, a novelist, and an African American woman of this time and age. Naylor's writings are juxtaposed with other associated texts, namely the writings of her predecessors and contemporaries. Such comparisons serve to contextualise Naylor's work, and more, to highlight the intertextuality within it, an intertextuality which heretofore had not been possible given the limited availability of literary works by African American women writers before the 1970s.The structure and form of Naylor's work are discussed in this thesis as are also the issues of women bonding, socio-economic oppression of proletarian women, the homogenisation of middle-class African Americans into the wider American society, women's sexuality, the language of women, "de-mythification", and the recasting of female characters in the retelling of tales. Although a feminist, Naylor has taken the unprecedented course of devoting her latest novel to the motivations, limitations and grievances of African American men, and consequently, one chapter in this thesis is also devoted to a study of black men, with emphasis on the male characters in Naylor's five novels. Naylor is as much a product as she is a part of the African American literary tradition, especially that of its women writers. The following is a study of the writings of a true daughter of African American literature, and increasingly, a young mother of the same.