Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Éva Miklódy: Redefining the "Other ": Race, Gender, Class, and Violence in Gloria Nay lor's Bailey's Café

in fact, one of the basic tenets of black feminist criticism, which, in view of this complex system of the black woman's oppression, labels the black woman as the "other." Since the concept of the "other" can emphasize difference in a meaningful way only in relation to somebody else, black feminist critics hold the view that the "other" encompasses all that are black, female, and from a lower social class in opposition with their white, male, and middle-class counterparts. This also shows that black feminist critics have appropriated and accomodated the concept of the "other" to suit their expressed political aims. My main contention is that in Bailey's Cafe, Naylor renounces this restrictive and exclusory view of the "other," and she rather integrates the variables of race, gender, and class, in order to achieve a more humanistic and universalistic illustration of the "other." For example, she reconsiders and alters the unequivocal role of blackness in the definition of the notion of the "other." Her obvious intention is to blur the color or racial as well as the ethnic lines when she merges the following ethnic configurations in Stanley, alias Miss Maple's, ancestry, who is one of the male patrons of Bailey's Café: "[...]I had aunts of all assortments: pure-blooded Yumas; full-blooded Negroes; full-blooded Mexicans; Yuma-Mexicans; Mexican-Irish; Negro-Mexicans; and even one pure-blooded African who still knew some phrases in Ashanti: all hearty and strong" (171). One of the best representation of Naylor's attempt to synthesize or integrate differences is Miss Maple's original name, Stanley Beckwourth Booker T, Washington Carver, which, according to some critics, is also an example of a move towards "cultural homogenization". Stanley's name refers to prominent AfricanAmericans in United States history; James Beckwourth, a frontier explorer; George Washington Carver, a renown scientist and inventor; and Booker T. Washington, who himself was a spokesman for assimilitation (Wood 384). The figure of Mary (Take Two)

—originally called Mariam—gives evidence of the possibility of combining various religious and cultural practices and backgrounds. Mariam, a fourteen-year-old black Ethiopian Jew, is a highly ironic personification of the Virgin Mary of the Holy Scripture, who, defying historical time and cultural environment, becomes impregnated by immaculate conception in the green hills of Ethiopia and gives birth to her son, George, in New York City. Prior to her expulsion from her native village and, because of her suspicious 59