She claims that “all African American women share a common culture and common experiences. This commonality of experiences suggest that certain core themes shape African American woman’s rhetoric and rhetorical behavior. These core themes are: (a) a legacy of struggle against racism, sexism, classism and other ‘isms’; (b) the search for voice as African American women battle their invisibility and fight to erase the controlling images that continue to denigrate them; (c) the interdependence of thought and action whereby intellectualism and political activism are conjoined; and (d) empowerment in the context of everyday life” (422). This combination of the everyday to the academic is important to Hamlet.
“The term, womanist, first coined by…Alice Walker, refers to a black feminist or feminist of color” (421). “Womanist thought…suggests a more holistic understanding of African American women their history, culture, and lived experiences thereby instilling and/or enhancing a rhetoric of self-affirmation and self-healing” (421). “Womanist scholarship positions African American women at the center of their own experiences and, in doing so, connects the everyday lives of African American women with the intellectual positions held by African American academicians and others in the academy” (421). “Womanist epistemology combines Afrocentric and feminist consciousness with the uniqueness of African American female history, culture, and experiences. This epistemology consists of (a) the use of concrete experience as a criterion for meaning, rendering knowledge as subjective and relying on the wisdom of African American women; (b) the use of humanizing dialogue that is rooted in the oral tradition of the African American culture and recognizes the connectedness as a primary characteristic of women's ways of knowing; (c) an ethic of caring that emphasizes individual uniqueness, personal expressiveness, emotion and empathy; (d) an ethic of personal accountability, whereby African American women assume full responsibility for the positions they take” (425).
Hamlet uses the rhetoric of Susan L. Taylor, who edited and wrote columns in Essence, as an example of womanist rhetoric.
Key Terms
- Optimal conceptual system: “assumes that the way a person views the world is so important because it ultimately determines [the person’s] experience and history…Racism and anger are the result of sub-optimal systems” (425)
- “Polyvocality of voice is an essential feature of most African American’s women’s standpoints and from which they speak simultaneously (i.e., race, gender, class, and sometimes sexuality) in their daily experiences” (423).
- “Power is the ability to define reality” (425).