The Discourse of the Oppressed in Literary Texts: The Case of Langston Hughes’ and Maya Angelou’s Poems

Abstract

Establishing a sense of the self in an oppressive regime is a complex process where one finds himself in a dialectical position between the self and the other. The social denial of the oppressed subject of all his civic, social, and even human rights begets exigent questions which cannot be answered unless the sense and position of the self vis-à-vis the sense and position of the other are established. Resisting oppression, ergo, becomes an insisting need, which requires an adequate medium. Having no access to institutional forms of discourse, African-American writers resort to literary discourse to express resistance of oppressive ideologies and practices acted upon them by the white community. Oppressors enact, (re)produce, and reinforce oppression through discourse. Equally, the oppressed groups resist and reject oppression through the very same medium, discourse. Resting on the assumption that discourse is a mode of action upon the society and upon the other and is a mediator of underlying ideologies, this study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach, aims at exploring how discourse mediates the ideologies of the oppressed in some poems of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. The thesis is composed of four chapters which provide a review of literature on the theory of the oppressed and critical discourse analysis, a postcolonial reading of the African-American literature, the analysis of the discourse of the oppressed as a mode of action in Hughes’ and Angelou’s poems and the postcolonial Algerian students of English reception of the discourse of the oppressed in literary texts.