Voices of color : Celebrating racial and cultural consciousness in selected African American works for children / Rehab Mohammed Mahrous Moubarak ; Supervised Abdeltawab Youssef

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

This study celebrates the achievements of African American writers for children who produced authentic texts that reinforce racial pride and cultural consciousness. In order to do this, this study examines and analyses selected African American novels and nonfiction children{u2019}s picturebooks. The selected texts are: Sad-Faced Boy (1937) and Lonesome Boy (1955) by Arna Bontemps; Song of the Trees (1975), Roll of the thunder, Hear my Cry (1976), The friendship (1987), The Well (1995), and The Land (2001) by mildred D. Taylor. The nonfiction picturebooks are: From Slave Ship to Freedom Road (1999) written by Julius Lester and illustrated by Rod Brown; and Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans (2011) written and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. The thesis will highlight the journey of the African American child protagonists in the selected works that address the various forms of oppression and marginalization as well as the process of earning their freedom and attaining a place of their own in the American society and, consequently, in literature. Such texts, though primarily addressing the 2Brownies,3 also aim to address white supremacy, with the target of correcting the dominant negative stereotypes of the inefficiency and inferiority of Africans. Related to the Civil Rights Movement, and the premise of race, and racial and cultural discrimination, the Critical Race Theory (CRT) will be used to analyse these selected African American works for children

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