ABSTRACT
The significance of Alice Walker’s narrators who question their own complicity in the project of colonial domination and her developing transnational consciousness is further illuminated by some of her nonfiction writing. Walker remains critical of the kind of Jewish feminism that in the final analysis advocates Zionism. In Meridian the concept of “world traveling” is demonstrated in the preoccupation of Walker’s characters with Native American history and the family’s Indian bloodline. Walker’s cross-cultural imagining arrives at a substantial level of maturity in the novels she produced in the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with her re-visioning of the colonial project in Africa in The Color Purple. Walker’s level of class consciousness is keen in her recollections of her visit to Cuba: the advantages of a classless society can be summed up in the potential of such a society to eliminate dehumanizing forms of social antagonism.
