Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Toward A Progressive African Americanism: Africanism And Intraracial Class Conflict In Twentieth- And Early Twenty-First-Century African American Literature, Laronda Meeshay Sanders-Senu

Doctoral Dissertations

In this work, I explore how African American authors and texts have contributed to or confronted what Toni Morrison calls “Africanism” in Playing in the Dark. I argue that the construction of blackness by non-black people and its consequent racial stigma, imbuing skin color with mental and physical inferiority, functions in an intraracial context to obscure the solidarity of all African Americans irrespective of their socioeconomic status. My work spans the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, investigating representations of the middle class who seek to deny or ignore the impact that a Eurocentric value system has on …