Unravelling the Mechanics of Black Freedom Struggle through the genre of Rhythm and Blues
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I mean, the only thing that has changed now-there are no chains around my ankles, as a people, but they’re around
my brain now. You know, you are made to believe that these things are better, but they’re not. They’re not.
—Herman “Junior” Denby
The past is a remarkable copious source of information about the present.
—Cater and Jones (1989: 107)
Marginalization has been a living reality for all African American women and it goes without saying that reverbrancesof their doubly colonized reality is directly or indirectly reflected in their creative-artistic expression. This essay is a visitation of the artistic expression of African American women’s living reality as finds expression in the rhythm and blues genre lyrics with an aim of unravelling the mechanics that validates their subordination and is further part of the dialectics that validates other such subordinations. In an interliterary, multicultural imperative, locating African American women in the realm of ecofeminism, two lines of thought that do not associate with each other, the essay attempts to bridge the gap between the womanists and the ecofeminists, embossing the similarities between the two theories, not to obliterate them but rather to work hand-in-hand, enriching each other, and becoming each other’s strength and systems of support, to fight the socially constructed myths through a re-writing of the history of African American women in keeping with gynocriticism’s call of creating a new canon in the female tradition.