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Trials and Trails: The African American Trickster Tradition In the Autobiographies of Maya Angelou.

Thu, March 17, 4:30 to 5:45pm, Omni Charlotte Hotel, Floor: Main Floor, Juniper Room

Abstract

In the first four installments of her autobiography Angelou narrates her life’s trails and trials. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the most popular of the autobiographies was published in 1969 at the end of the Civil Rights Movement and in the youth of the Black Power Era in the United States. However, Caged Bird discusses the years 1928-1944 from her birth to age seventeen. The foundations laid for her in her formative years in Stamps, Arkansas would serve as her moral and emotional compass guiding her from one experience to another. Although, Caged Bird doesn’t discuss the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Power Era the text provides rich insight into what it took to mold a personality complex enough to stand racial and sexist hegemony during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Freedom Era. This work seeks to unveil the presence of the trickster-tradition in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together In my Name, Signin’ and Swingin’ and Getting Merry Like Christmas, and Heart Of a Woman. In doing so, it will attempt to locate her work as an essential bridge into the Black Freedom Era of literature from Civil Rights Movement. The trickster-tradition is one of the mediums African Americans use to express and reify their world view. In allowing the trickster prototype to anchor my analysis I am provided with sufficient evidence through a meta-textual analysis to assert that there is a trickster tradition present and working within Angelou’s writings in particular. African and African American folklore, literature and autobiographical genres intersect in the works; the roads between history and literature genres are blurred.

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