earticle

영어

Alice Walker places racism, sexism, and oppression in a historical context and tries to revise western and white-centered history, and epistemology in The Temple of My Familiar. Walker creates the reincarnated Miss Lissie who can remember all her former lives to show the history of oppression. Lissie’s experiences and her conversation of her all lives are mainly about marginalized people’s unrecorded history. Thus, in this paper, I claim that Lissie’s storytelling is a way to revise western and white-centered history and episteme. Hybridity and the African diaspora are also the main themes of this text. Walker attempts to show that African Americans’ identity formation is complex by connections with Indians and whites in the text. To this end, Walker focuses on African Americans’ emotional confusion of their identity, but puts more stress on African American women’s multifaced oppression including patriarchy and racism as well as African American women’s problems of identity. I argue that Walker, however, aims for the characters’ recovering wholeness and carries out African heritage with revision of history. All the stories in the text are for personal and communal wholeness, integration and negotiations with past.