Narrative has the power to construct worlds both fictional and real—to carve out spaces for marginalized voices, to engage in the most intimately human conversations, and to open up new possibilities for expression and resistance. The narrative worlds Gayl Jones constructs in Corregidora and Eva’s Man betray “linearity, logic, and conventional realism,” as Trimiko Melancon states (140), in order to challenge our thinking about racialized gender discourses taken up in the law, the economy, and in literary representation. Using “unnatural” narratology—a theory that has attempted to grapple with postmodern texts such as Jones’s—as a mooring point, this project intends to explore how Jones uses disruptive narrative practices to write up against the boundaries of stereotype and positivist representations of black subjectivities. By radically shifting how she tells her protagonists’ stories, Jones invites her readers to question the many oppressive forces that shape Corregidora and Eva’s Man while giving her protagonists a way to resist these forces with the power of their own voices, or lack thereof.
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