Dynamics of Self, Family and Community

Dynamics of Self, Family and Community presents a critical exploration of the narrative space of African American author, Gloria Naylor. It offers a fresh insight into the author’s representation of African American life and culture, highlighting her notions on the transitions in individual identity, family and community. Naylor's fictional world is constructed keeping in mind the shifts in the structure of the African American identity and community as it developed since the days of slavery. She looks back at these transformations from the perspectives of a middle class writer writing in a most crucial period, the 1980s onwards, and this prompts the analysis of her representation of the African American self, family and community in the states of transition and (re)construction. This book takes readers on a journey to find out how Naylor responds to the challenge posed by the changing notions of the self, family and community divided along class lines as she found in the 1980s onwards.