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335 chapter six Alice Walker Matters THE FRUITS OF GENDERED SPACE i. reconstruction of southern racial space How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? . . . It is not only the codes—the map’s legend, the conventional signs of map-making and map-reading— that are liable to change, but also the objects represented, the lens through which they are viewed, and the scale used.—henri lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991) Alice Walker, that famous spirited Georgia native, certainly does not need a rehabilitation of her reputation. Yet, as I have been thinking about Southern Studies and scholarly production, I began to notice that Walker has slipped out of recent discourses and that her contribution to the ways in which we today think about the South, its literary and cultural production, has been occluded in part by her own adherence to what we might call New Age, nonheteronormative political spiritualism. With that notice, I began to think about how Alice Walker, an artist forged on the battleground of Mississippi during the height of civil rights activism, may have been one primary catalyst in naturalizing how so many scholars and artists approach the South today, and with that naturalizing a concomitant erasing of her very positionality in the process. “The life of thought is a continuous story, like life itself,” Yi-Fu Tuan observes in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), “one book grows out of another as in the world of political commitment one action leads to another.”1 For me, in thinking about Walker, the concept of process intermingled with that of the continuous story and thus the necessity of following the thought backwards to pay closer attention to how the narrative came to be what it is. As a result, here I look backward over the multiple intersecting ALICE WALKER MATTERS|336| public and private spaces that constitute the material and theoretical contributions of Alice Walker to the multidimensional and multidisciplinary work today in the new Southern Studies. Walker begins a postmodern stance toward both race and region in her deconstruction of arenas and hierarchies of power and in her transgression of the fixed and rigid notions of art, epistemologies of art, and production of art, as well as in her anticipation of the shifts in gender theory and with it cultural transformation in the very geographical matrix that was the South of her childhood and youth. When Walker brought together place and identity in her work, she destabilized both categories and began the process of the reformation of both. She invented her own “radically subjective politics” within a matrix of change, but she did not produce an identity that is fragmentary, conflicted, or contradictory despite its fluid boundaries. She produced texts, critical and creative and autobiographical, that defied the notion of clearly defined and readable meaning explicit in and based upon established transcendental precepts. She saw pluralism and relativism, rejected nostalgia and sentimentalism, and claimed political relevance for her transformative positions and subversive ideologies, all the while insisting on her own vision, certainly idiosyncratic and subjective but not fractured or paranoid. In beginning to write in the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, Walker envisioned both the importance of articulating her own new southern black woman identity and the necessity of new formations and new modalities— even while asserting the changing ground for all such formations and modalities . In particular, she was able to foreground the damaging impact of racism and patriarchal authority/power in her short fiction, poetry, and novels, as well as in her essays, and in the process, to create a space for the gendering of subjectivity and reassessing gendered racial hierarchies. In the conjunction of her political and literary work, Walker examined gender and ideological formations under segregation and displayed an ability to map the postmodern at a time when among African American writers there was still a strong adherence to modernist aesthetic productions. Walker’s emphasis on difference then becomes one of the primary ways of linking her to a postmodern aesthetic, especially by means of her collapsing the distinctions between genres and destabilizing the hierarchy of high and low culture, high and low art, and exploiting the class dynamics to challenge the hegemony of a white racialist society. In ascribing to Walker’s work a revolutionizing southscape , I read her as personifying the political...

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