R. Saravana Selvakumar Assistant Professor Department of English V.V.College of Engineering Tisaiyanvilai
The role of woman in Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, Death and the King’s Horseman and The Swamp Dwellers.
African American community remained silent about gender even as race has moved to the forefront of our nation’s consciousness. Hard-hitting and brilliant in its analysis of culture and sexual politics; Gender Talk asserts boldly that gender matters are critical to the Black community in the twenty-first century. In the Black community, rape, violence against women and sexual harassment are as much the legacy of slavery as is racism. Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheft all argue powerfully that the only way to defeat this legacy is to focus on the intersection of race and gender. Gender Talk examines why the race problem has become so male-centered and how this has opened a deep divide between Black women and men. The authors turn to their own lives, offering intimate accounts of their experiences as daughters, wives, and leaders. They examine pivotal moments in African American history when race and gender issues collided with explosive results-from the struggle for women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century to women’s attempts to gain a voice in the Black Baptist movement and on into the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement and the upsurge of Black Power transformed the Black community while sidelining women. Through the centuries, the Hindu woman in literature has been based on the mythic models from Ramayana and Puranas: Sita, the silent sufferer – the archetype of Indian womanhood; the Earth-Mother, forbearance personified; the playmate and beloved Radha; the devotee Meera. Patterned on these Hindu models, the woman is often passive accepting the dynamic role of the men in her life.