English Language and Literature Commons^™

Redefining Blackness In The Age Of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, And Self-Identity In Afro-Caribbean And Afro-American Literature, Brandon Marcell Erby

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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 …