'Writing in White Ink' - Textual strategies of resistance in Zora Neale Hurston´s 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' and Alice Walker´s 'The Color Purple'

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 5.5, University of Basel (Englisches Seminar), course: Seminar Afro American Writing, language: English, abstract: The first book ever published by an Afro-American, was written by a woman. Since the publication of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, however, the literary discourse in African American literature has been dominated by male writers. Similar to white literature, Afro-American women had only a marginal position in the creation of their writing. At the beginning of the last century, Virginia Woolf wrote about the relationship between woman and fiction in A Room Of One's Own: 'Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history '(66). This practical exclusion from the literary process, or as Abbandonato puts it, 'female silencing' (1107), has provoked the emergence of an Afro-American feminist literature. In the last century, writers such as Nella Larsen, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, just to name a few, started to write against the grain of dominant racial and gender discourses. In this paper, the breaking down of this gender bias through techniques of resistance will be explored in two novels by their fellow writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.