Cultural Identity in African-American Women Writers’ Work: Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry

Abstract

The paper explores the causes and consequences of forced cultural alienation in the particular case of the United States and contrasts the melting pot concept to that of the salad bowl, linking the latter to harmonious personality development and rejecting the former as oppressive. It also revisits stereotypical cultural misrepresentations of Africa and African-Americans with a focus on their negative impact on the black female psyche. Meant to coerce black women into adopting artificially constructed identities so as to estrange them from their culture and keep them locked into subordinate positions in all institutions of American society, distorted images of black womanhood are seen as a vile and despicable attempt to convince the public that black women themselves, through their supposedly cultural and moral shortcomings, and not discriminatory practices of any kind, are responsible for their marginalization