Cultural Nationalism In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

The 1960s witnessed a surge of Civil Rights movements aimed at improving the living conditions and social status of minorities in the United States. Within the African American community, a trend arose where youths rejected their cultural upbringing in favor of a perceived pure African way of life in order to further African American liberation – Cultural Nationalism. While the movement had many supporters, critics within the general Civil Rights campaign were not afraid to challenge the trend. One of these critics, Alice Walker, used the short story Everyday Use to demonstrate why the Cultural Nationalist actions belittled African culture, rather than praising its diverse traditions distinct in language and customs from other areas of the world. She accomplishes this through the character’s varying means of appreciating a family quilt patched together by hand …show more content…
Through the use of the quilt metaphor, Walker exposes the hypocrisy associated with the Cultural Nationalism movement of the 1960s, ultimately alluding to the inability of the American pursuit of individuality to be fulfilled by aligning oneself with a distant cultural heritage. The character Dee in Everyday Use fails to understand the greater meaning behind the practical use of the quilts, revealing her ignorance towards her original heritage that she has chosen to reject. Prior to the introduction of the quilts, Walker presents the two clashing perspectives on African American identity in the 1960s and 1970s: one of assimilation and one of reversion. The narrator mother and her daughter, Maggie, represent the former. They take pride in the culture in which they have spent the majority of their lives; however, this is not the culture of their ancestors. Due