Date of Award
Spring 5-19-2014
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA English
Department
English
Advisor
Dr. Simone Alexander
Committee Member
Dr. Jeffrey Gray
Keywords
Native Son, A Raisin in the Sun, Prospero's Daughter, Colonialism, Patriarchy, Mimicry
Abstract
The elements associated with mimicry and colonialism are found in Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), as the novel reveals how colonized subjects use mimicry to survive their colonized spaces. Keeping in mind the ideologies of Homi Bhabha and Wumi Raji, the novel also suggests how a subject’s pre-existing condition before being colonized develops agency. Comparably, while Elizabeth Nunez’s novel illustrates how imitation is used by black and native Caribbeans, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1958) contextualize and exhibit W.E.B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness theory and the struggles that black Americans experience while mimicking whiteness or Western mores. Evaluating representations of black manhood and womanhood in the United States, or more specifically, Chicago’s Southside, Wright and Hansberry also reveal how race, class, gender, and religion intersect and dictate the lives of black people on a daily basis. Together, Nunez, Wright, and Hansberry reconfigure the often mimicked—or performed—portrayals of black gender roles and sexuality under a white patriarchal society.
Recommended Citation
Erby, Brandon Marcell, "Redefining Blackness in the Age of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, and Self-Identity in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American Literature" (2014). Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs). 1965.
https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/1965
Included in
American Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons
