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Oppression in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place: A Reading through the Lens of Black Feminism and Intersectionality (pp. 125-143)

Mónica García Morgado 

Universidad de Valladolid

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate the importance of reading contemporary African American women’s fiction through the lens of Black Feminism in order to understand the undeniable reciprocal relationship between both. Hence, I analyze Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982)under the light of Black Feminism and Intersectionality, following the works of acclaimed Black Feminists, to show Naylor’s concern and portrait of the multiple oppressions Black women were subjected to in the United States in the second half the twentieth century, while fighting against those in her fiction. I conclude The Women of Brewster Place is a literary masterpiece both for the study and for the identification of the influences of Black Feminism in contemporary African American women’s literature to this day.

Keywords: Gloria Naylor; The Women of Brewster Place; Black Feminism; Intersectionality; Oppression

Bionote

Mónica García Morgado is passionate about African American women’s fiction and Black Feminism and has a great interest in US Popular Culture in the fields of popular fiction, film, and television series. She is currently working on her master’s thesis on Brit Bennett’s novels, and she aims to enter a Ph.D. program to research twenty-first-century African American women’s fiction.

e-mail address: monica.garcia.morgado@outlook.com

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