“From the root of the old one” : reconfiguring individual and collective identities in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry

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2007
Türe, Özlem
This thesis analyzes how Afro-Caribbean poets writing in English appropriate language and use memory as a thematic tool to articulate postcolonial identities. The present study is organized in three parts: the first part provides the necessary theoretical background regarding postcolonial theory, the politics of hybridity and resistance; the second part examines poets’ struggles over language and social forms of poetry; the third part deals with the site of memory as a revisionary tool in rewriting history poetically, binding pre-colonial and colonial identities, and healing the fractured psyches of postcolonial societies. The struggle over language and the use of memory enable the Afro-Caribbean poet to reconfigure individual and collective identities. For these purposes, Grace Nichols’ i is a long memoried woman (1983), Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s X/Self (1987) and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Tings’ an Times (1991) will be analyzed.

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Citation Formats
Ö. Türe, ““From the root of the old one” : reconfiguring individual and collective identities in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2007.