Race, gender, and desire

Employing interpretive strategies from semiotics, narratology, feminist theory, and ideological analysis, Elliott Butler-Evans explores the manner in which the politics of race and gender overdetermine the narrative structures of the fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. He argues that their writing is "often the site of dissonance, ruptures, and...a kind of narrative violence generated by...these two distinctly different, and often contending, expressions of desire." For novelists such as those considered, the identification "black women writers" suggests the ideological duality that both limits and expands the meanings within their literature. After locating the nationalist, black aesthetic, and black feminist discourses in the writings of Morrison, Bambara, and Walker, Butler-Evans argues for a problematic tension between the racial and gender ideologies in the authors' fictions of the 1970s. In a concluding chapter, he demonstrates how the writers' use of post-modern narrative strategies enables them to figure a black feminist ideological position in their fictions of the 1980s. Author note: Elliott Butler-Evans is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.