Re-configuring paternal legacies through ritualistic art: daughters and fathers in contemporary fiction by women of African descent.

Abstract

In “Re-Configuring Paternal Legacies through Ritualistic Art: Daughters and Fathers in Contemporary Fiction by Women of African Descent,” I analyze three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their own muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. In this dissertation, I use theoretical formulations developed in disciplines such as literary studies, gender studies, Brazilian regionalist studies, and African diaspora studies. These interdisciplinary approaches have allowed me to map the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto’s As mulheres de Tijucopapo/The Women of Tijucopapo, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. I define ritualistic art as any folk art form that individuals employ to achieve healing and transcendence, liberate muted histories, honor their spatial environments, and reintegrate themselves into their communities. I explore father-daughter relationships as connections that are held together by participation in ritualistic art forms that honors folk wisdom, storytelling, and vernacular utterances that are invoked through dreams, mythology, and archetypal figures of the African diaspora. Throughout the dissertation, I consider how generations of survivors, generations of families work through issues of grief, forgiveness, and the need to remember, the need to retell buried histories. I engage with these ideas within the context of the cultural productions of female artists, writers, and knowledge creators and their relationships to the legacies of their fathers. The concepts of paternal loss and paternal yearning in their various forms take a center stage in the art created by these daughter-protagonists. In the three texts examined, ritualistic art is described as practices that are multivocal, both here and there, multi-local, and multi-temporal— spanning time and space, bending and transfiguring the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical. It is through the practice of ritualistic art that the community becomes accessible to the Afro-diasporic daughters featured in this dissertation. My point of entry into an analysis of these three texts is based on a reassessment of the muted histories of fathers who contribute significantly to female subjectivity, yet have been traditionally relegated to the margins of gender studies and other types of social research. Even today, too many members of the African diaspora are forced to experience fatherhood through absence and loss. Millions of men of African descent are violently ripped from their families as a result of state sponsored violence, warmaking criminalization, and the combined hardship of racism poverty. When black fathers are present daughters are often at a loss. Women are forced to reconcile personal, social, and political histories, with our desire, myth and longing for a “father figure.” My work privileges texts that depict daughter-protagonists as artists who use their imagination to summon their paternal legacies. In doing so, these texts also connect literary, aural, visual art forms and the ways folk artistic expressions inspire contemporary Afro-diasporic women artists to re-articulate, reinforce, and at times transgress social conventions.