The Enigmatic Status of Womanhood in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: A Postcolonial Approach

پوختە

This paper applies postcolonial literary criticism to examine the problematic status of womanhood as preoccupying the position of subalternity in the colonized society by means of investigating Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Given this, it explores the postcolonial conceptions as reflected and employed in the novel. Therefore, this study argues that the constructs of double colonization and double oppression problematize the status of the colonized woman in The Color Purple in which most of the women characters suffer from double-edged policy as enacted against them. Women in the novel are systematically exposed to both the colonial power and the patriarchal system simultaneously. The research, meanwhile, thoroughly criticizes the racialized policy and mindset thereby analyzing the discursive discrepancies and polarizations between the so-called unequal pillars of blackness and whiteness that signal the constructed identitarian subjects in the novel. In the light of this, the paper showcases the depictive paradigms of slavery in The Color Purple, demonstrating that slavery acts as a hidden structure of family construction and blurs the self-image of black women. In addition, the paper further contends that the characters’ methods of language use are another means whereby the individuals’ identities, worldviews and their positions in the world are determined. Finally, the paper argues that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple attempts to criticize feminism for neglecting the black women rights when their resistance to the oppression is at issue.