Narrating African American Migrations: Mobile Literary Voices and Shifting Narrative Strategies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32870/vel.vi3.23Keywords:
migration, mobility, subaltern, decolonial, narrationAbstract
The essay starts with the historian Ira Berlin’s assumption that African American culture is specifically shaped through continuous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Through the analysis of exemplary texts by Olaudad Equiano, Ralph Waldo Ellison, and Edwidge Danticat, the essay traces
shifting paradigms within the narration of black mobility in African American literature from late eighteenth-century colonial America to the present. The essay tracks narrative strategies that African American writers employ to tell stories of displacement and relocation. At the center of this discussion is the question of the respective author’s positioning through discourse in the larger contexts of postcolonial, subaltern and decolonial studies perspectives.
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