Extolling Blackness: The African Culture in The Color Purple

Abstract

Alice Walker, advocates African cultures in her epistolary novel The Color Purple. Underscoring the fact that quilt-making has an ancient history in the black community and presents the African tradition of folk art and the rich legacy of visual images in African culture, Walker employs the image of quilts and quilt-making to associate with the symbolic meaning of sisterhood, family history and self-creation. Also, she depicts Shug as the most popular character as a blues singer in the novel, to indicate that she acknowledges her mode of thinking that blues as one secular African tradition can deliver its spiritual power to African Americans.