Difference And becoming in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar


Khaoula Jaoudi
University of Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni Mellal, Morocco
DOI : https://doi.org/10.58806/ijirme.2024.v3i3n14

Abstract

Today’s Postmodern world finds itself in a crisis of how to address its diversity as we move forward in our fight for gender and racial equality. Alice Walker is an African American writer whose fiction is very illuminating in terms of embracing the differences within each and every one of us. Her characters represent an invitation for people to look outside of the realm of their familiar, to experiment with the unfamiliar and to absorb and cherish the differences in us by immersing in processes of becoming and growth. Walker’s transgressive characters project a variety of experiences that speak against the homogenizing nature of essentialism. They embody the postmodern philosophy of becoming, multiplicity, fluidity and creativity which I intend to unravel through a pluralistic analysis that aims to overcome the dangers of fixed identities by relying on Process philosophy and Deleuzian ontology of difference.

Keywords:

Alice Walker, Diversity, Process, becoming, post-structuralism

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