| In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose | Alice Walker | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | 1983 |
From Wikipedia: Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose is a collection composed of 36 separate pieces written by Alice Walker. The essays, articles, reviews, statements, and speeches were written between 1966 and 1982. Many are based on her understanding of “womanist” theory. Walker defines “womanist” at the beginning of the collection as “A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female”
Table of Contents
Part I
- “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life”
- “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience”
- “But Yet and Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…”
- “A Talk: Convocation 1972”
- “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor”
- “The Divided Life of Jean Toomer”
- “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children”
- “Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson”
- “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View”
- “Looking for Zora”
- “Bash the Whites”
Part II
- “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was it?”
- “The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist, or of the Black Writer Who Simply Works and Writes”
- “My Father’s Country is Poor”
- “Making the Moves and the Movies We Want”
- “Good Morning, Revolution:Uncollected Writings of Social Protest”
- “Choice: A tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
- “Coretta King: Revisted”
- “Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years after the March on Washington”
- “Lulls”
- “Recording the Season”
- “The Almost Year”
Part III
- “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
- “From an Interview”
- “A Letter to the Editor of Ms.”
- “Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life”
- “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?”
- “Looking to the Side, and Back”
- “To The Black Scholar”
- “Brothers and Sisters”