The postcolonial imagination: Race, identity, and (post)coloniality in selected African-American fiction

This study explores the ways in which African American writers attempt to overcome the so-called internal colonization in American society to gain the voice and freedom of African Americans through the postcolonial imagination expressed in resistant writing patterns. To this end, I apply postcolonial theory and African American literary theory to read African American texts. By surveying the selected African American novels that cover the sentimental convention up to the contemporary postmodern trend, I also trace the ways in which African American literary aesthetics have developed in the tradition of American literature.; Chapter One explores the interconnectedness between postcolonial theory and African American literary theory. Chapter two investigates the mulatto heroines' processes of escaping from bondage to freedom in William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) and Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892). In Chapter three I compare the plight of black intellectuals in Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). In Chapter four, I examine Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987). To demonstrate Jones's and Morrison's postcolonial imagination in these postmodern texts, I apply the Korean notion of haan to investigate the healing process of collective pain and suffering of the African Americans in terms of postcoloniality.; In conclusion, I argue that the selected authors' writings are concerned with their strenuous efforts to liberate African Americans from pain and suffering through their postcolonial writing. I believe that my dissertation will shed new light on the research of African American literature because I trace the development of African American literature under the perspectives of postcolonial and African American literary theory, and also I try to connect the Korean notion of haan in reading the selected African American texts.