Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American LiteraturePosted in Articles, Barack Obama, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-05-30 21:01Z by Steven |
Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American Literature
European Journal of American Studies
1, 2011, Varia
Document 6
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.9232
Daniel Stein
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
This article provides a series of close readings of Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric and argues that Obama uses the text to create a life story that resonates with central concepts of African American selfhood and black male identity, including double consciousness, invisibility, and black nationalism. The article reads Dreams from My Father as an attempt to arrive at a state of “functional Blackness,” which moves away from questions of racial authenticity and identity politics but recognizes the narrative powers of African American literature to shape a convincing and appealing black self.
Read the entire article here.