From Marx to Weber: A Reading of the Black Bourgeois Ideology in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills

Mohamed A. M. BAMBA

Numéro 14 – RILE-2 de 2019 (Deuxième numéro 2019) (2019) Page(s) 89 - 103 ISSN 2076-6130

This contribution deals with the fictional representation of the black bourgeois ideology, which acquiesces to the dominance of black people by complicity and participation. It shows that an articulation of superstructural Marxist theories on the one hand, put forth by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, and Max Weber’s sociological concepts on the other, can adequately account for that paradox. As it appears, the black bourgeois are interpellated by American capitalism, and their ideology of self-reliance, hard work and personal enrichment is a direct response to a reified environment. The Weberian analysis confirms these findings, and adds a dimension pertaining to status honor: the black bourgeois’ attachment to the American Creed largely stems f 90 revolutionary Grand Soir. The most appealing idea in Gramsci’s work is the notion of hegemony, the fact that the bourgeois ruling classes’ ideologies prevail in the minds of subalterns, thus fostering their own subjugation by complicity and complacency. This seminal concept is the starting point of my reflection on the class struggle among African Americans, between the middle class – or the black bourgeoisie as E. Franklin Frazier named them – and the lower classes, as staged in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow1. This peculiar class struggle, waged at the periphery of the capitalist structure between two equally oppressed social groups, resists the traditional Marxist analysis based on a bourgeois/proletarian

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Mohamed A. M. BAMBA. « From Marx to Weber: A Reading of the Black Bourgeois Ideology in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills ». Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères, Numéro 14, 2019, p. 89. ISSN 2076-6130.