Da cor da cultura à cultura da cor: o Black English em The Color Purple

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse why Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, looks at North American history from the perspective of an Afro-descendant woman through her characters. It is significant that the author chooses a linguistic register that is different from the one used in the dominant white society. And, therefore, through the enunciation, we became aware that Walker wanted to hold a dialogue with her generation drawing on her ancestry for inspiration. Our interpretation of Walker’s work is totally different from the North American critics who branded her a rebel. We distinguished the main female discourse characteristics, the exclusion and minority discourse, from the racism and sexism prejudices, the identities formation that define differences and finally the noncanonical discourse. We used material in Celie´s and Nettie´s letters along with The Color Purple in our research. We chose the approach of French Discourse Analysis and also a national point of view as methodological support and these analytical principles provided the materialised linguistic, printed from the Black English perspective; the reference process, discursive formation, interdiscourse and polyphony. It is extremely important to mention that all the research dialogues were developed together with Cultural Studies, which supported us with the historical and cultural ground for the identity construction, the exclusion, and also for the power relations that crossed the minority groups’ discourses in the corpus. It is also relevant to state that we took the Translation Studies as a base, not only from a linguistic and literary perspective, but involving aspects from the society to provide a Cultural Translation. Our approach has been to reduce the cultural differences and, therefore, cultural borders have been disregarded due to the media available and virtual nature of our time. Due to the intense and rapid aspects, the translation issues emerge more frequently in the discussions. In general, given these theoretical bases, our focus was, mainly, on the discursive formation of the black, illiterate female discourse, where the subject is also sexually abused and who fights for life in a marginal world, where the white dominated society forces restriction, prohibition and silence on the minorities.