Portsmouth Cathedral Institute hosts a series of talks on six books that got people talking. Join speakers at the Cathedral for a short presentation followed by an informal discussion.
Free
Lecture by Dr Sally Shaw
This talk explores Alice Walker's 1982 Pulizer Prize winning novel The Color Purple. Written in the epistolary form, The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a young African American woman living in the American South in the early 1900s. Walker wrote the book to 'tell the stories of my ancestors' and it is this re-imagining of 'a silent generation' which makes the book both compelling and controversial. The Color Purple is sexually explicit, places emphasis on brutal male violence, provides a very early discussion of FGM and celebrates female queerness - all themes which placed the book on banned lists. Walker, however, saw the book primarily as 'a theological text' - as such, Celie's spiritual transformation draws on Walker's 'Womanist' perspective and Black Liberationalist theology, which are in themselves contested perspectives.