Fiction as Autobiographical Resurgence: A Black Feminist Autoethnographic Analysis of Gloria Naylor’s 1996

The present paper analyses the social-cum-political facets of objectification and marginalization of African American women in Gloria Naylor’s memoir 1996 (2005). The study endeavours to underscore how the incursion of the domineering mainstream hegemonic-cum-stereotypical world order relegates the lives of African American women in general, and Naylor in particular, to the margins of the margin, and constantly harks back at them to the point where they had to declare that their lives no longer belonged to them, but to those unfamiliar/familiar persons who followed them like a hellhound, eventually robbing them off their individualities as well as their privacies. By employing Black Feminist Standpoint as theory and autoethnography as methodology, the paper emphasizes on how, by amalgamating her actual life experiences with fictitious narrations, Naylor accentuates upon the besmirched and dishonoured status of Black women in America who are falsely blamed of being anti-Nationalist because of their colour, ultimately stripping off their identities and persecuting them to the point where they are forced to commit suicide. However, it is only when they receive support from a group of people with analogous encounters that they gather strength to combat with the mainstream power structures and construct their own standpoints.