Alice Walker Research Paper
Studies in Literature
Dallas, Tx.
Alice Walker
Poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, anthologist, teacher, editor, publisher, womanist and activist, Alice Malsenior Walker was born at home on February 9, 1944, near Ward’s Chapel, a neighboring community of Eatonton, Georgia. She is the eighth and last child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker. In 1994, Walker changed her middle name to Tallulah-Kate, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, the African-Cherokee ancestor Tallulah Calloway, and of Kate Nelson, her paternal grandmother.As a self-described “daughter of the rural peasantry,” Walker grew up in a loving household in the years following the end of the Great Depression. Though poor, the family …show more content…
In our great-grandmothers’ day?…How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.” Walker wants the readers to consider how the will to artistically create is ineluctably linked to the will to survive, especially for those in society who have historically been denied any and all expressions of freedom, including creativity. It is within this link between survival and creativity that Walker opens up a new way in which to think about artistry, specifically the artistry of African American women, by considering the smallest efforts at preserving momentary “beauties” as herculean efforts at maintaining humanity. Under her perspective, survival itself becomes an act of artistry. Alice Walker traces the umbilical thread linking women writers through history; from her discovery of Zora Neale Hurston and her collections of black folklore, to the work of Jean Toomer, Buchi Emecheta and Flannery O’Connor. She also looks back at the highs and lows of the civil rights movement, her early political development, and the place of women’s traditions in art. Coining the expression “womanist prose,” these are essays that value women’s culture and strength, the handing on of the creative spark from one generation to
Dallas, Tx.
Alice Walker
Poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, anthologist, teacher, editor, publisher, womanist and activist, Alice Malsenior Walker was born at home on February 9, 1944, near Ward’s Chapel, a neighboring community of Eatonton, Georgia. She is the eighth and last child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker. In 1994, Walker changed her middle name to Tallulah-Kate, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, the African-Cherokee ancestor Tallulah Calloway, and of Kate Nelson, her paternal grandmother.As a self-described “daughter of the rural peasantry,” Walker grew up in a loving household in the years following the end of the Great Depression. Though poor, the family …show more content…
In our great-grandmothers’ day?…How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.” Walker wants the readers to consider how the will to artistically create is ineluctably linked to the will to survive, especially for those in society who have historically been denied any and all expressions of freedom, including creativity. It is within this link between survival and creativity that Walker opens up a new way in which to think about artistry, specifically the artistry of African American women, by considering the smallest efforts at preserving momentary “beauties” as herculean efforts at maintaining humanity. Under her perspective, survival itself becomes an act of artistry. Alice Walker traces the umbilical thread linking women writers through history; from her discovery of Zora Neale Hurston and her collections of black folklore, to the work of Jean Toomer, Buchi Emecheta and Flannery O’Connor. She also looks back at the highs and lows of the civil rights movement, her early political development, and the place of women’s traditions in art. Coining the expression “womanist prose,” these are essays that value women’s culture and strength, the handing on of the creative spark from one generation to