RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

T Deivasigamani

doi:10.29121/granthaalayah.v4.i12se.2016.2476

Abstract

Jamaica Kincaid is an American novelist, short-story writer, gardener, essayist, and reviewer. She has become one of Caribbean’s major woman writers in recent decades. Kincaid’s writings comprise exile, search for identity, and alienation. Her production strikes the reader with a balanced mixture of anger and loss. Kincaid’s great variety of issues draws so many readers to her writings. Kincaid’s novels reflect her desire to draw on the people, places, language, race, mother-daughter relationship, values, cultural traditions, and politics that have shaped her own life and that of African American people. In America, Racial discrimination is very common and hurts very much. During the slavery era, white people had black people as slaves in their own household. Black people have to satisfy their white masters. If the white people were not satisfied, they would try to hurt the black people. This paper “Racial Discrimination in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother” focuses on how race plays a pivotal role in Africans literature and their day today life and how blacks suffered for their survival. It also reveals how Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother illuminates black American experiences in the contemporary American society from various perspectives. It also shows how black women have been exploited in a white dominated male chauvinistic society. In the face of enormous problems and frequent victimization, black women are shown imitating through their sense of community and social powers.

Highlights

African American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with other themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home, segregation, migration, and feminism
Category, and punishes them for their differences. This system gives white people many advantages over other groups. This racial advantage has been labeled '' white privilege, '' and allows whites to be complacent about racial issues because instead of being hurt they benefit from their race
This paper “Racial Discrimination in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother” focuses on how race plays a pivotal role in Africans literature and their day today life and how blacks suffered for their survival

Summary

Introduction

African American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with other themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home, segregation, migration, and feminism. This study examines how Jamaica Kincaid presents the sense of black identity and how she celebrates black women and the problems of race in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother.

Results

Conclusion