SOURCE: Thompson, Dorothy Perry. “Africana Womanist Revision in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe.” In Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, edited by Margot Anne Kelley, pp. 89–111. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

In the following essay, Thompson discusses Naylor's focus on race and gender in Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe.

In their attempts to analyze the texts in Gloria Naylor's complicated tetralogy—The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey's Cafe—critics have often appropriated Eurocentric approaches that run the gamut from finding Chaucerian and Shakespearean analogues to employing Derridean theories of absence. Feminists have seized Naylor's oeuvre eagerly, exploring its dense symbology for delineations of oppressed women prevalent in the texts, especially Linden Hills and Bailey's Cafe. Given Naylor's personal history, as it informs her work, such discursive authorities, or sites of meaning, seem valid. She's an American female with an ivy league education—a...