초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This article re-engages the civil rights movement represented in Alice Walkers Meridian by teasing out gender as a central operator for discussion. To avoid reiterating a familiar simplistic binary of gender and race, I follow a double trajectory: tracing the history of the SNCC, which was characterized by its less gender-determined structure and interracial activism, while examining Walker's feminist critique of the movement. My contention here is that gender serves as a touchstone that can be used to examine intersecting points of local/national and private/public ramifications of the movement, which are structurally gendered. In the course of addressing the ways in which the politics of race was at odds with feminist concerns, I seek to find an answer to the question of how a black nationalist agenda and a black feminist consciousness can be deployed without excluding each other while kept theoretically tenable. Finally, I argue that the ambivalence of the title character, Meridian, who is kept doubly invisible in terms of race and gender, stands in for the difficulty of restoring historical continuities and asserting an authoritative voice in writing about the movement, whereby Meridian can be read as a literary representation of the movement.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
gender, black womanhood, SNCC, Alice Walker, post-civil rights, ambiguity, black consciousness, Rosa Parks, interracial, bridge leadership, representation&fnote;* This article was supported by the Brain Korea 21 project at Sungkyunkwan University. R
