The Color Purple and its Adaptations as a Tool to Analyze Black, Feminist, and Queer Intersectionality

This paper analyzes the two film adaptations of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) to look at how queer Black identity is portrayed and received by the public. As the only book to win a Pulitzer Prize with a Black queer female protagonist, The Color Purple is an integral story that speaks to Black resilience in the face of generational trauma, domestic abuse, and racial oppression. With all that Walker’s book hopes to accomplish, in film adaptations Celie and Shug’s queer relationship is often overlooked or intentionally hidden to be made more palatable for viewers. By looking at Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation in the context of the end of the Blaxploitation movement of the 1970s and the beginning of the “New Black Cinema” movement in 1983, I investigate the stylistic choices and artistic liberties the adaptation took, which led to a mitigation of Black queer identity and a perpetuation of the “angry Black man” stereotype, while also honoring the risks it took to showcase Black womens’ resiliency in the face of violence. I then contrasted it with the 2023 musical that sought to put Shug and Celie’s identity at the core of its adaptation but still faced criticism for straying too far from the original text. I use close textual analysis of film reviews and newspaper articles to determine how successful each of the adaptations are in portraying Black, queer womens’ experiences. To do this, I look at the reception the films received from the Black as well as Alice Walker’s response to the adaptations of her novel. After this analysis, I determined that the 2023 musical allows Walker’s female protagonists to express their identity as Black, queer women more successfully than the 1985 film adaptation.