A S Tudy Of Black Females' Liberation In The Color Purple From The Perspectives Of Power And Discourse

In the history of American Literature,the study of minority literature has been made by an increasing number of scholars and a great progress has been achieved.Among the novelists,African-American female writer Alice Walker deserves people's attention.Her works describe about African-American females' living experience and spiritual world.Writing from unique perspective,she reveals how various African-American females make a survival and progress in the white people's world.Her novel The Color Purple has become her most popular work,which lays a solid foundation for her in the contemporary literature.As the winner of both of the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize,The Color Purple contains power,discourse,truth and culture factors,unveiling the miserable sufferings of Afro-Americans under the influence of power and discourse.Therefore,this thesis intends to analyze Alice Walker's representative work The Color Purple with the support of Foucault's power and discourse theory,hoping to manifest the control and oppression to black people under the mechanism of power.This thesis can be divided into six parts.Firstly it makes a brief introduction to the author Alice Walker and her work The Color Purple.After introducing the overseas and domestic studies of this novel,it concludes the research questions and significance of this thesis.Then Foucault's power and discourse theory is introduced,as the theoretical foundation of this thesis,it respectively explains the concept of power,discourse and their interrelationship among power,discourse,knowledge as well as truth.Based on the theory,this thesis deeply analyzes the helplessness and voicelesssness of African-American people under the power oppression of white people and black males and then reveals African-American females' resistance against racial and patriarchy power oppression with great efforts and insistence.They subvert the white beliefs,racist and sexist culture,finally obtaining their emancipation and liberation.Such resistance and success correspond with Foucault's opinion about the liberation of human beings: where there is oppression,there is resistance.The extreme repression imposed by the ruled class must incur the resistance of those inferior groups.Finally this thesis reveals the helplessness and voicelessness of African-American females under the control of power and discourse and at the same time,emphasizing that only through resistance can they be the owner of the power of discourse and the subject of speech.This thesis makes a brief analysis of The Color Purple with the support of Foucault' power and discourse theory,indicating that the process of African-Americans' struggle to be liberated is the process to pursue the power of discourse.The exploration of power reveals Alice Walker's in-depth concern for the marginal group and her reflection on power into this novel.