Angelou's theme of identity was established from the beginning of her autobiographies, with the opening lines in Caged Bird, and like other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. In the course of her autobiographies, her views about Black-white relationships changed and she learned to accept different points of view. Walker, all of Angelou's books describe "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". Their unity underscores one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. Angelou's autobiographies can be placed in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. The rest of the books in her series are Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013).īeginning with Caged Bird and ending with her final autobiography, Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird (which represents the confinement of racism and depression) struggling to escape its cage, as described in the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy". Angelou (1928–2014) is best known for her first autobiography, the critically acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). The themes encompassed in African-American writer Maya Angelou's seven autobiographies include racism, identity, family, and travel. Rachel Helps (handling editor) contact Reviewers: ( comments) Kai Alexis Smith (handling editor) contact This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies. Content has also subsequently been used to update that same Wikipedia article Wikipedia: This work is adapted from the Wikipedia article Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies ( CC BY-SA). "Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies". Post-publication review comments or direct edits can be left at the version as it appears on Wikipedia.Ĭhristine Meyer (). It was adapted from the Wikipedia page Themes_in_Maya_Angelou's_autobiographies and contains some or all of that page's content licensed under a CC BY-SA license. “One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.This article has been through public peer review. It’s to suggest that other folks aren’t experiencing this particular vulnerability.” - Barack Obama It’s not meant to suggest that other lives don’t matter. “It’s important for us to also understand that the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ simply refers to the notion that there’s a specific vulnerability for African Americans that needs to be addressed. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans.” - Nikole Hannah-Jones “We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. “In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” - Thurgood Marshall
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