Date of Completion
Spring 5-1-2015
Thesis Advisor(s)
Eleni Coundouriotis
Honors Major
English
Second Honors Major
Urban and Community Studies
Disciplines
African American Studies | Africana Studies | Comparative Literature | English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority | Philosophy | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Abstract
Various scholars in Ethnic Studies have made the claim that people of color in the United States have constituted a colony within. That is to say, by virtue of the effects of institutional racism racialized bodies in the United States have experienced a form of colonialism unique to the American context. Examining the connections between forms of subjectivity in the United States and in Africa, this paper attempts to extend the concepts “social life” and “social death” to the literature of continental Africa. Through a close reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” and Richard Wright’s “The Outsider” & “Native Son,” this paper examines the ways in which each novelist characterizes the ability of the Black subject to express agency in an antiblack world.
Recommended Citation
Oppong-Yeboah, Emmanuel, "Agency and Afro-Pessimism: Richard Wright and Ayi Kwei Armah" (2015). Honors Scholar Theses. 1038.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/1038
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Africana Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Philosophy Commons