عبدالله, محمد سعد راتب. (2024). Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems. مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم, 16(2), 132-232. doi: 10.21608/jfafu.2024.284587.2042
محمد سعد راتب عبدالله. "Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems". مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم, 16, 2, 2024, 132-232. doi: 10.21608/jfafu.2024.284587.2042
عبدالله, محمد سعد راتب. (2024). 'Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems', مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم, 16(2), pp. 132-232. doi: 10.21608/jfafu.2024.284587.2042
عبدالله, محمد سعد راتب. Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems. مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم, 2024; 16(2): 132-232. doi: 10.21608/jfafu.2024.284587.2042
Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems
This paper aims to explore Maya Angelou's poetic representation of the forms of racist oppression experienced by African-Americans in a White dominant community by employing Iris Marion Young's faces of oppression theory. The paper also attempts to examine how effectively Angelou's anti-racist poetry reflects the negative impact of the various forms of oppression on the life and collective survival of African-Americans. Through the analysis of a selection of Angelou's poems, five forms of racial oppression of Black Americans are identified, namely ethnically-based exploitation, racialized marginalization, African-American powerlessness, White Americans' cultural domination, and racist violence. African-Americans are, thus, portrayed in Angelou's poems as innocent victims of racial discrimination. They suffer humiliation, deprivation, lack of equality, lack of self-respect, lack of self-confidence and loss of power and autonomy. Yet, Angelou, through her poems, expresses her conviction that African-Americans can defiantly struggle and persist to set themselves free from the grip of their White oppressors.