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355786

Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems

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Last updated: 24 Dec 2024

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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.

DOI

10.21608/jfafu.2024.284587.2042

Keywords

Maya Angelou, forms of racist oppression, Iris Marion Young, oppression theory, anti-racist poetry

Authors

First Name

محمد سعد راتب

Last Name

عبدالله

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

كلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم

Email

msr02@fayoum.edu.eg

City

الفيوم

Orcid

-

Volume

16

Article Issue

2

Related Issue

47751

Issue Date

2024-07-01

Receive Date

2024-04-22

Publish Date

2024-07-01

Page Start

132

Page End

232

Print ISSN

2357-0709

Online ISSN

2735-3281

Link

https://jfafu.journals.ekb.eg/article_355786.html

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https://jfafu.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=355786

Order

5

Type

المقالة الأصلية

Type Code

970

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم

Publication Link

https://jfafu.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems

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Article

Created At

24 Dec 2024