Unearthing New Dimensions of Black “Womanism”: Poetic Resistance and the Journey from Absence to Self-Representation

Mounir Ben Zid

Abstract


Significant headway has been made in investigating white feminist monolithic strategies and exploring how black females have suffered from patriarchal ideology and stereotyping, and how they were placed in an inferior position and treated as slaves and sexual machines. In research conducted on women of color, however, little attention is paid to black females’ new vision of black “womanism” and its means of struggle. With this in mind, the aim of this study is twofold. First, the goal is to elucidate why black women were victims of white prejudice, despotism, and patriarchal practices. Second, we wish to demonstrate how black females set themselves free from racial ideology and Western hegemony by opting for poetic resistance to achieve hypervisibility, seek their own spirituality, worship their black female deities, restore the joy of their motherhood, and assert their identity. The findings yielded by this research provide support for the key argument that black "womanism" and poetic resistance are the means of self-representation and liberation from Eurocentric, dehumanizing, and exclusionary ideology to repossess one's erased self.

Keywords


White Feminism, Black “Womanism”, Poetic Resistance, Visibility, Self-Representation

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.10n.6p.12

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