Black Woman: Strategies at Resisting Devaluation in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Meridian

This article explores and exposes the various ways by which the black
woman is recouped from varied domineering structures that have
continued to limit her progress and contribution to development in the
USA. Black women have greatly progressed, but still, some instances
continue to resurge and delimit black female contributions that have
already been impacted. In response to the following questions, this article
reverberates two basic strategies and concerns that are intricate in
rebuilding and unravelling the black woman’s distinctiveness in the USA
centuries gone. Are there edifices that continue to impound black women
in the US? How does she resist them in the communities in which she
finds herself? How successful does she emerge at the end of Alice Walker’s
narratives under study? Based on created and achieved consciousness,
to resist such devaluing structures for black women, the heroines and
black female characters primly engage individual determination/
motivation, and bonding as agencies that are cogently provocative of
substantial change. Black feminist standpoints of Barbara Smith and
Bell Hooks have been adopted to guide the articulations of this paper
highlighting the intertwining and influence of racial, gender, sexual, and
classist structures to formulate an accurate identity for the black woman.
Nonetheless, resistance is tantamount to revolutionary change and
development of the black woman from the margins to the centre

Keywords: Black woman, devaluation, resistance, strategies