Beyond Sisterhood: Alterity, Internal Exclusion, and the Politics of Belonging in Morrison and Naylor

Abstract

This article examines alterity, marginalization, and community fracture in African American women’s writing through two novels: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Black female solidarity is often celebrated as a site of resistance, and rightly so. Yet both novels also show how marginalized communities can reproduce, among themselves, the hierarchies that oppress them. On the one hand, the article sets out the theoretical and spatial framework. It distinguishes two senses of alterity (the Levinasian ethical Other and the Other produced by domination), and it draws on Black feminist and intersectional thought, spatial theory, and the philosophy of epistemic injustice. On the other hand, it offers a comparative reading. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison shows how internalized racism destroys Pecola Breedlove, how the demand to be respectable divides the Black community, and how that community, by refusing to see or acknowledge Pecola’s suffering, becomes part of her ruin. In The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor shows how a walled-in street of mutual aid turns on Lorraine and Theresa, a lesbian couple, and exposes the limits of conditional sisterhood. The article argues that both authors refuse a romanticized vision of community: liberation requires confronting the otherness that exists outside marginalized spaces and also within them.