Department of Humanities

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://repository.chuka.ac.ke/handle/chuka/261

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Browsing Department of Humanities by Subject "African American literature"

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    Racial contestations in the black lives matter movement: the memoir approach
    (Chuka University, 2024) Gitonga James
    Extensive research has been conducted on racism in African American literature. Much of this literary scholarship has predominantly utilized a fictional approach, thereby marginalizing actual human experiences. This study attempted to fill the gap by examining racial contestations during the Black Lives Matter Movement through memoirs, specifically Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad and When They Call You a Terrorist; A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele. The study was guided by two objectives: To examine the memoiric techniques employed in the selected works and to investigate racial reception by the people of colour in the chosen memoirs. The investigation revealed how binaries range from general contrasts like light/dark and white/black to more complex and culturally significant elements such as man/woman, colonizer/colonized, and self/other. A postcolonial theoretical framework, particularly Edward Said's concept of Orientalism was adopted to examine racial contestations in the selected memoirs. This theoretical strand provided an interpretive framework to interrogate how white supremacists exercise dominance and hegemony over others. The literature review underscored the importance of this study, demonstrating that racial studies have historically subjected people of colour to stereotypes, necessitating the memoir as a tool to counter inherent hegemony. Being qualitative in nature, the study, relied heavily on close reading and analysis of the texts, supported by secondary sources such as journals, dissertations, internet sources, and other relevant materials. The study is organized into six chapters. The first chapter provides the background, outlining the problem, objectives, and research questions. Chapter two covers the literature review, critical reception of the memoirs under scrutiny and theoretical framework, while chapter three discusses methodology and ethical considerations. Chapter four examines the memoiric techniques, detailing the uniqueness of presentation in the memoir genre through truth telling, emotional Journey of the narrator and the first-person narrative voice. Chapter five explores the racial reception by the people of colour,arguing that the cradle of power lies with the hegemon due to white Supremacy and racial stereotyping. Chapter six presents the findings, showing that memoirs, through their unique techniques, diverge from fictional genres in recounting the experiences of people of colour. Furthermore, it demonstrated that the marginalization of the other persists due to white supremacy, which fosters white privilege. As such, future research should investigate how white-authored memoirs portray racial conflicts and explore whether Black Supremacy concept exists. This study is significant as it presents the memoir as an indispensable tool to present actual human experiences.
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    Representations of the african american experience through yoruba mythology: an analysis of tomi adeyemi’s Trilogy LEGACY OF ORISHA.
    (Chuka University, 2025) Kobia,Eva Nkatha
    Myth is the repository of the values of the society, and the writer who seeks to interpret his society must of necessity be concerned with myth. Various approaches have been adopted in the criticism of African American literature over time, including the empathy inherent in slave autobiographies, the sentimentalism of the abolitionist literature, black pride of the Harlem renaissance, the political poetry of the civil rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement up to the modern-day digital revolution. These approaches have been enriched mainly by socio-political movements coupled with individual creativity. It is curious that despite having originated from Africa which has a rich heritage of oral traditions, writers and critics of African descent have accorded little attention to the ways in which orality contributes to the black man’s experience in America. This research attempted to fill this gap by analysing the use of Yoruba mythology in African American novels, focusing on Tomi Adeyemi’s trilogy Legacy of Orisha comprising of three texts namely Children of Blood and Bone, Children of Virtue and Vengeance and Children of Anguish and Anarchy. Three objectives guided this study: first, to explore various Yoruba myths in the trilogy Legacy of Orisha; secondly, to explore the nexus between these myths and African American experience in Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orisha; and finally, to analyse myth aesthetics in Tomi Adeyemi’s Trilogy of Orisha. The myth criticism theoretical framework pioneered by Claude Levi Strauss and advanced by later critics was adopted to examine the use of African orality and synthesize relevant mythological and diasporic issues. in the selected texts. Being qualitative in nature, the research relied on content analysis to analyse the selected novels. This study examined primary texts through purposive sampling, selecting a trilogy published between 2018 and 2024 that prominently features mythological elements. The trilogy is authored by an African American author and the texts are thematically rich in terms of socio-political issues. Secondary texts, including critical essays, theoretical works, and cultural studies, were systematically reviewed using a literature review matrix to identify key scholarly debates and gaps. The findings of this study show that the author presents fantastical elements suggesting that reconnection with ancestry can provide frameworks of resistance and identity formation. Additionally, the study reveals that the struggle over mythology is the struggle over narrative authority. Lastly, the study reveals that African mythology presents a rich narrative and symbolic depth just like traditionally favoured western mythologies. The study contributes to the scholarship practice. Pedagogically, the findings provide frameworks for teaching African mythology and Diasporic representations. The study provides insights for representations of myth which can be used for the development of reading material for children. Additionally, the research offers applications for journalism materials and media production.