The Autobiography Of An African American Woman

Novels like The Chosen Place, The Timeless People' and 'Praisesong for the Widow, have one thing in common and that is the lead character is a African American woman. When we think of racism we think of the whole population, but we see a majority of males; therefore we neglect the female perspective. In these novels, it shows racial oppression in colonial invasion and going back to their roots. In the novels it is either connect with your past or be destroyed their location on Carriacou, off Grenada which is East of the Caribbean and closest to Africa. Which among these places have “long painful histories of slavery and colonialism, manifest both physical and temporal characteristics which seem to demand a kind of settling accounts” (The Chosen

In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the author is a black man trying to pass as a white man. As a slave narrative, he uses this method to confirm the “white” society. However, there is prejudice because it is on the outside looking in and not facts. A fair skin man caught between the either claiming white or black; he chose white. "The Autobiography, of course, in the matter of specific incident, has little enough to do with Mr. Johnson's own life, but it is imbued with his own personality and feeling, his views of the subjects discussed, so that to a person who has no previous knowledge of the author's own history, it reads like real autobiography" (v-vi). A lot of readers were confused on the stand of the anonymous author; there was ideas of conservative views on race and class or the “butt” of Johnsons’ irony (p2).Critics say “ the narrator is frequently self- consciously ironic in his treatment of significant issues concerning himself and his race… but at other times he is blind to narrowness…” (Critics, p2). Since he has claim the identity of white, he has almost believed that he is so, as if becoming the part. He now thinks like one of them and acts as one too. Johnson wanted to do something same as “the fugitive slaves [that] wrote glowingly of the lack of racism they perceived in Europe” (Johnson,