Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems | ||
| مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم | ||
| Article 5, Volume 16, Issue 2, July 2024, Pages 132-232 PDF (855.59 K) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/jfafu.2024.284587.2042 | ||
| Author | ||
| محمد سعد راتب عبدالله* | ||
| كلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This paper aims to explore Maya Angelou's poetic representation of the forms of racist oppression experienced by African-Americans in a White dominant community by employing Iris Marion Young's faces of oppression theory. The paper also attempts to examine how effectively Angelou's anti-racist poetry reflects the negative impact of the various forms of oppression on the life and collective survival of African-Americans. Through the analysis of a selection of Angelou's poems, five forms of racial oppression of Black Americans are identified, namely ethnically-based exploitation, racialized marginalization, African-American powerlessness, White Americans' cultural domination, and racist violence. African-Americans are, thus, portrayed in Angelou's poems as innocent victims of racial discrimination. They suffer humiliation, deprivation, lack of equality, lack of self-respect, lack of self-confidence and loss of power and autonomy. Yet, Angelou, through her poems, expresses her conviction that African-Americans can defiantly struggle and persist to set themselves free from the grip of their White oppressors. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Maya Angelou; forms of racist oppression; Iris Marion Young; oppression theory; anti-racist poetry | ||
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