The Politics of Lived Space: Black Feminist Subjectivity and Narrative Resistance in Alice Walker's Meridian

Abstract

 The paper explores how the spatial configurations in Alice Walker's Meridian are dynamic locations where Black female subjectivity is constructed, limited and negotiated. Drawing upon feminist spatial criticism, it argues that the various landscapes in the novel, such as communities, educational institutions, and politics, are unified spaces that entangle racial and gendered exclusions in an attempt to control the visibility, movement, and voice of Black women. The movement through and between liminal and marginalized spaces by the name that Meridian carries finds what the author calls a counterprecise spatial practice where she rebels against the fixed social labels and reclaims the authority over the prevailing discourses of activism, motherhood, and sacrilege. The transformation of lived spaces into spaces of discipline and ease of ethical contemplation is an excellent example of how unstable the hegemonic spatial orders exist, and how one can conceptualize a sense of identity through a spatial reorientation. Associating personal space with shared political scenes, Walker proves that space is both an arena where power is exercised on the Black female body and a place where moral questions and historical awareness are discussed. Finally, the novel prefigures gendered space as the key to interpreting Black female subjectivity, showing how the feeling of space mediates a tension between social obligation and individual autonomy, which existed in the mid to late twentieth century during the civil rights era.