consider the ways that Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers” (1973) reflects Cornel

  For your first response paper (750 words), which is due Tuesday, October 3rd, consider the ways that Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers” (1973) reflects Cornel West’s call for a new kind of cultural worker in his essay, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” If we take the literary as an important kind of cultural work, then how does her short story represent a kind of resistance—at the level of culture—to what West identifies as “the modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness” (102)? Focusing upon the imagery, characterization, and symbolism of Walker’s short story show how Myop, the main character, represents a different approach (or radical response) to what West means by “invisibility and namelessness” and the problem of “White normative gazes” (107). Think about what kind of a “world” this story evokes, how it represents a certain experience of knowledge or truth as well as a certain history of trauma or identity formation (gendered and raced). Consider as well how Walker’s short story reveals what West calls the “underside” of modernity (100). You may also want to consider West’s important critique of European modernity as premised upon what he calls a “false universalism” (103). How, for instance, does the experience of the main character in “The Flowers” teach her—and thus the reader as well—about the falseness of European universality, that is, its ideas (and norms) concerning truth, beauty, and who or who does not belong to the “human”? Please use MLA formatting, proofread, and make a clear and coherent argument.