159-170

Το μεταμοντέρνο υπερφυσικό : Αφρο-Αμερικάνες συγγραφείς και οι λογοτεχνικές τους δυνάμεις

• Vega-Conzalez, Susana

The supernatural is one of the recurrent themes in the narrative produced by contemporary African American women writers. The postmodernist subversion of ontological borders goes hand in hand with these writers’ own cultural and ethnic heritage in which there is not a clear division between the supernatural and the natural worlds, beween life and death. In their attempt to redefine the Western concepts of reality and history, Toni Cade Bambara,Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison pay a fair tribute to unheard voices from the past, strengthening present and future identities and bringing to the fore displaced and marginalized ways of knowing and perceiving the world.For a traditionally downtrodden people such as the African American, the supernatural stands out as a site of resistance and a source of power before white dominion. In the literary discourse, it is employed as a strategy of subversion and transgression of linear narratives and binary oppositions, as well as an apologia for the hybridity and the validity of an intuitive, spiritual and ancestral knowdedge. These writers’ novels are dominated by ghosts, visions, superstitions, and the magic of the emblematic conjure woman, whose role as a liminal figure between the human world and the beyond parallels the marginality of the African American community in the white North American society. By bringing the dead back to life, by claiming the value of the past and by recovering the image of the conjure woman, contemporary African American women writers create healing and empowering narratives of resistance.

• Languages and Literature

• Λογοτεχνία
• Literature and anthropology

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