Encountering Racism and Oppression in African American Life Writing

Abstract

The study “Encountering Racism and Oppression in African American Life Writing”
focusses on analyzing the texts such as William Wells Brown’s Narrative of William
W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847), Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901),
and Malcolm X as well as Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) under
the lens of Postcolonialism. These texts are placed across a temporal and a spatial
dimension thereby plotting the history of the evolution of African American
population in the American society. The study does a multifaceted comparative
analysis of the texts from several angles based on a scathing indictment of chattel
slavery, and the marginal status of the oppressed, exploited, and the dispossessed in a
multicultural society. The texts serve a fertile ground for exploration of oppression
based on race, and class. The notions of nation or nationhood, questions of identity,
preoccupations with race, language, class, power, cultural integrity of the oppressed,
the self-determination of the exploited subjects, the notions of aporia, ambivalence,
and indeterminacy, reworking of colonial art forms, and the notions of “other”,
“hybridity”, “mimicry”, and “subaltern” are explored within the purview of these texts.
The appropriation and domestication of language is an aspect that is observed in all
the three life writings.