A literatura feminista e negra escrita por Zora Hurston, Alice Walker e Eliana Alves Cruz: poética da diversidade e negritude nas Américas afro-diaspóricas

Abstract

This article analyses three novels written by black women in the afro-diasporic Americas: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching god, Alice Walker’s The color purple and Eliana Alves Cruz’s Água de barrela. Written in the United States and in Brazil, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these literary works provide discussions about black cultures and it’s relations with society. With a bibliographic review and an inspiration in the structural reduction of novels, created by Antonio Candido’s Sociology of Literature, the prose of Hurston, Walker and Cruz resulted in the use of literary studies and the socioanthropological theories: black feminism, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall’s cultural studies, Édouard Glissant’s poetics of diversity and négritude. Firstly, there was an examination of the meaning of the concept of black literature, in this case, specifically written by women, which exhibits an international aspect in proximity of the ideas of Gilroy’s Black atlantic, Hall’s diaspora and Glissant’s poetics of diversity. Besides, the novels were considered as part of a black feminist thought, which, in the search of it’s protagonists for self-definition, subjectivity and identity, encounters with the négritude movement, the diaspora’s aesthetics and a literature of Relation. It was then emphasized that Hurston, Walker and Cruz portray black ways of speaking, which develop an appreciation for speeches that are despised by the white western ideology. About the literary works, a new “Africa” is produced, with the black individuals returning to themselves. In an attempt of seeing the connections between the mentioned theories, this article also thought of the possibility of a new humanism inside these novels. In this way, these literary works are a diaspora’s black and feminist literature related to a poetics of diversity and négritude.