Self and Other in the Works of African American Novelists during the Black Renaissance and Algerian Novelists during the Algerian War of Independence

Abstract

Through the present research work, we aim at confronting four contemporary post-colonial writers, who are, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston from the United States of America, and Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar from Algeria with notions of representation, identity, and culture. While Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston wrote their novels at the time when the African American people suffered from political, economic and cultural inequities between the white and the black people in America, Toomer’s Cane in 1922 and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 ; both Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar wrote their novels during the period of Algerian colonization, Nedjma in 1955, and Les enfants du nouveau monde In fact, this thesis operates on the principle that there are recurrent, common parameters existing within the two peoples, Africa American and Algerian, and which stem from shared historical, political and cultural referents, those of peoples deprived of their identities and self-esteem by colonizing and oppressing powers. The writers we explore in the present work bridge racial, cultural, and linguistic divides in facing the same prejudices and stereotypes that have ‘Othered’ them. They adopt the same methods in reconstructing the Self that has been negated by the colonizing Other. In both cases, the people oppressed by a superior power are depicted in stereotypical terms, their culture belittled, and their identity blurred. in 1962. Through the present research work, we aim at analyzing the thematic correspondences between the two pairs of writes, particularly in the way they conceive of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’