Abstract
"To Be Black and 'At Home'" augments a relatively understudied
area of African diasporic scholarship, comparative examination of
African American and African Canadian literatures. I argue that
African American and African Canadian novelists including Ann Petry
and Austin Clarke provide nuanced representations of the
experiences of people who persistently encounter discrimination
because of their belongings to marginalized racial, gender, and
class groups and show how movements such as national and
transnational migration, educational attainment, and economic
advancement can represent acts of resistance to inequitable
treatment. The selected literary works also demonstrate how these
physical, intellectual, and economic movements are affirmations of
blacks' right to access national ideals of freedom, equality, and
justice in the United States and Canada. For example, the black
female protagonists in Petry's The Street (1946) and
Clarke's The Meeting Point (1967) exercise
intellectual mobility to achieve their visions of economic
prosperity, which are commensurate with ideals of freedom and
equality that govern the nations in which they reside. As
marginalized members of their national communities, they learn that
they do not equally benefit from these ideals, but this lesson does
not prevent them from gaining education and using other types of
mobility to demand access to opportunities for economic success.
Their employments of movement therefore become acts of resistance
to discriminatory treatment and affirmations of their right to
achieve ideals of freedom and equality in the nations they call
home. Although I focus primarily on African American and African
Canadian literatures, I assert that themes of belonging, movement,
and freedom have the potential to unify diverse literatures and
cultures throughout the African diaspora. Racism, for example, has
specific manifestations in particular nations and cultures.
However, people throughout the African diaspora grapple with the
inhibiting consequences of belonging to marginalized racial groups.
Therefore, I argue that literary works, historical analyses, and
other diasporic texts provide important knowledge about ways in
which particular belongings affect opportunities for freedom and
various types of mobility in multiple national locations.
Table of Contents
Introduction...1 - 14
Chapter One...15 - 49
Chapter Two...50 - 80
Chapter Three...81 - 107
Chapter Four...108 -137
Works Cited...138-149
Notes...150-155
About this Dissertation
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