Open    Access



Afro-American Socio-Psycho Resistance Against Oppression of Identity



Author(s)

Amber Mushtaq

Full-Text PDF XML     877 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2019.10.008

Social discrimination of races and racial oppression in American colonial history had deep devastating impact on Afro-Americans. Their true identities were shattered and the truth of their existence was constructed for them by the so-called superior white American race. Afro-Americans’ struggles for recognition had been started since the moment racial oppression took place and United States might profess now to be agenda-free but contemporary Afro-American literature does not say so. Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Race Analysis of Toni Morrison’s work manifests that Afro-Americans are still struggling for their recognition and their place in the white US society; she delineates their pain of going through the continuous identity-formation process that how white American society still make them finding escapes because of their dark skin tone and put them in need to prove them to be worthy of living in America. Her writing has helped analyze Afro-American subjectivation through a series of socio-psycho conceptualizations. Frantz Fanon’s work on western colonial racial oppression and identity crisis of blacks has helped analyze what traumatic culture Afro-Americans faced. His work sheds light on that disrespect and contempt experiences of blacks in personal and collective terms which they have been facing under the rule of white supremacy. Morrison’s fiction and Fanon’s “socio-psychopolitics”—his critical psychological approach analyzes the identity crisis that functions betwixt sociopolitical and psychological realms—have yielded the analyses of how manipulative power of “Racial Politics” actualizes its agendas. Morrison’s work demonstrates how historical trauma of turning Afro-Americans into stereotypical subjects still prevails in the blacks living in the contemporary racist and prejudiced white America while Fanon’s work gives a vast and detailed framework of analysis; his work consists on intersectionality and psychopolitical violence which have been forcing blacks to turn their identities into whiteness by accepting blackness as if it is evil.

Afro-Americans, identity crisis, socio-psychopolitics, subjectivation, racial oppression