“WE CANNOT BE FREE UNTIL THEY ARE FREE”: REWRITING THE NARRATIVE OF IMMERSION IN ALL-AMERICAN BOYS AND MONSTER

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Date
2019
Authors
Feher, Kimberly Rose
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Middle Tennessee State University
Abstract
Authors of African American literature have addressed the traumas caused by systemic racism—slavery, Jim Crow, or mass incarceration—in order to protect and uplift the next generation. This thesis contributes to the discourse surrounding literary portrayals of the effects of systemic racism on individuals and communities by exploring how authors of contemporary African American young adult literature—Walter Dean Myers, Brendan Kiely, and Jason Reynolds— utilize Robert Stepto’s paradigm of the narrative of immersion in order to respond to the calls of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Myers’s Monster (1999) terminates the narrative of immersion to confirm Wright’s call from Native Son (1940) that institutional racism in America’s criminal justice system thwarts the ability of young, Black males to develop into contributing members of society. Kiely and Reynolds’s All-American Boys (2015) answers the call issued from Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) that in order for Black Americans to gain true freedom and equality, white Americans must confront and overcome their fear and racial ignorance. Reynolds and Kiely write their young adult novel in dual chapters from the points view of Rashad, a young Black male, and Quinn, a young white male. Rashad’s quest embodies a contemporized narrative of immersion for young Black readers trying to understand their role in modern America whereas Quinn’s journey teaches white readers to recognize their privilege and take action against racial injustices. Though the didactic impulse has been studied in works of African American young adult texts and Stepto’s work has been applied to adult African American texts, there has yet to be thorough study of how Stepto’s paradigm contributes to the didactic impulse. My project challenges scholars to fill the gap left by this neglect.
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British and Irish literature
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