This essay argues that Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother depicts how the indigenous colonized in Dominica are living ‘unhomely lives’ and that their experience is one of the double consciousness. i.e. when a person see the world through different "lenses." The person does not only have a dual personality but also feels the notion of having different roles in society, such as having a black identity and at the same time conforming to the stereotypical norms of the white society for a black person. Therefore, the person sees the world, and oneself, through one’s own “black” lens and the “white” lens at the same time. Subsequently, with a setting full of diversities, the novel depicts a colonial background where the characters have been ascribed certain features to their persona. Furthermore, the novel uses metaphors to show a futile endeavor of finding identity of the main characters in an ineluctable power structure. By utilizing the postcolonial theoretical framework; mainly Du Bois’s notion on ‘double consciousness’ and Bhabha’s term ‘unhomely lives’ which means to grow up between two cultures, to live on borders and in margins and not feel at ease in either sides, expands the readers understanding of the text. A central aspect of the novel is the alienation of an individual’s personal identity in the context of a postcolonial society. Therefore, the psychology of the novel’s characters will be a major theme of this essay. Nevertheless, the novel shows that it is hard for the characters Alfred and Xuela to break free from the bonds of society.

This study argues that the formation of Americo-Liberian identity overwhelmingly relied on White American middle class cultural values despite the founders' criticisms and rejection of racial oppression and slavery. Americo-Liberians' previous participation in a culture that downgrades African heritage fostered the internalization of Western notions of civilization and African inferiority that led them to establish an oppressive regime similar to the one they had escaped from, and even enslaved the indigenous population, which they considered "uncivilized." The study thus investigates how formerly oppressed and enslaved blacks became oppressors and enslavers of other black people in the name of a "civilizing mission." The relationship that developed between Americo-Liberians and indigenous Liberians provides a case study to explore the impact of White supremacy ideology on enslaved Africans and racial uplift ideology. Building on contributions of social theory and conflict theory my analysis of Americo-Liberians demonstrates how social class and ideology interacted to produce socio-economic developments that led to the Liberian Civil War. This study covers the founding of Liberia as a republic during the 1840's through the League of Nation's intervention in 1928. It is during this time period that Americo-Liberians fostered an exploitative and colonizing relationship with the indigenous Liberian population. Previous scholarship regarding Liberia engages in descriptive analysis this study is the first to employ the theoretical framework of double-consciousness to further illuminate the ambivalent positions of the Americo-Liberians vis-a-vis indigenous Liberians

Brick Lane has stimulated a wide range of debates regarding Monica Ali's portrayal of the inhabitants of the area from which the novel has taken its title. This essay claims that assimilation is the key theme of the novel, and that the desire to achieve it is represented most strongly in the character of Chanu. The latter's primary goal is to assimilate himself into the English society in which he now lives. In order to demonstrate just how complex this assimilation process is, Chanu is discussed in relation to society's influence on him and four concepts of post colonial theory, namely double consciousness, unhomeliness, mimicry and hybridity.

Denna uppsats är en litteraturstudie av Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Studien syftar till att undersöka argumentet att rasism har en långvarig effekt på de människor som utsätts för rasism. I detta fall, karaktärerna i romanen som utsätts för rasismens olika hemskheter så som slaveri. Genom användningen av Robert Jensen, WEB Du Bois och Edward Saids teorier (dvs. Privileged/unprivileged, The Veil, Double Consciousness och Others) har romanen Roots analyserats. Slutsatsen visar på hur slaveriet påverkade huvudpersonerna och hur effekten av slaveri lyckats beröva de svarta människorna i romanen deras ursprungliga identitet. Slaveriet ersattes istället av en kollektiv identitet av mindre värde än vita människors identitet vilket lämnat långvariga psykiska ärr för karaktärerna i romanen. Det pedagogiska fokus som används i uppsatsen är den så kallad cooperative learning metoden.

Set against the backdrop of the Transatlantic slave trade, Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River can be read as a novel which explores severed family ties and the intertwined relationship between the dominant and the subdued within the African diaspora. Questions concerning “race”, identity and representation can be traced in all the narratives and are also the focus of this essay. Diasporic identities most often involve a double consciousness, seeing and/or identifying with different perspectives. All of the characters are clearly affected by slavery and/or racism directly or indirectly. This essay will argue that this is evident in all the narratives, using Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic to illustrate this point. However, when it comes to representation and whose voice is heard, Phillips’s choices of focalization have adverse implications for the representation of Africa and Africans. Although the novel explores identities of people of the African diaspora and one of the narratives, “The Pagan Coast”, is set in Liberia, the country remains anonymous, and no African is awarded a voice in that narrative. In his attempt at capturing the essence of African diasporic identities, Phillips has neglected the influence of Africa and Africans.

The study critically investigated the concept of ―Double Consciousness‖ in selected African-American autobiographies. In view of the latter, W.E.B. Du Bois defined double consciousness as a condition of being both black and American which he perceived as the reason black people were/are being discriminated in America. The study demonstrated that creative works such as Harriet Jacobs‘ Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Told by Herself, Frederick Douglass‘ The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois‘ The Souls of Black Folk, Booker T. Washington‘s Up from Slavery, Langston Hughes‘ The Big Sea, Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks on a Road, Malcolm X‘s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou‘s All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, Cornel West‘s Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud and bell hooks‘ Bone Black affirm double consciousness as well as critiqued the concept, revealing new layers of identities and contested sites of struggle in African-American society. The study used a qualitative method to analyse and argue that there are ideological shifts that manifest in the creative representation of the idea of double consciousness since slavery. Some relevant critical voices were used to support, complicate and question the notion of double consciousness as represented in selected autobiographies. The study argued that there are many identities in the African-American communities which need attention equal to that of race. The study further argued that double consciousness has been modified and by virtue of this, authors suggested multiple forms of consciousness. / English Studies

As Paul Gilroy has argued, the Black Atlantic is a cultural and literary network that has emerged in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade. The concerns of the Black Atlantic are made visible in the poetry of African American Langston Hughes and Cuban Nicolás Guillén. Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of ‘double consciousness’ which describes the “doubleness” that blacks can experience when belonging to two groups at the same time which have been constructed as oppositional and exclusive in a society. One of Du Bois’s main concerns is to highlight the troublesome situation of the African Americans in the time after the emancipation, and to advocate for the inclusion of black people’s culture and identity into the U.S. national identity. Gilroy develops the idea of double consciousness to question national identities, notions of ethnicity, and the assumption that cultures always flow into congruent patterns with national borders; he further suggests that the Atlantic should be taken as a single, complex formation of black cultural expression. The analysis in this essay of the poems by Hughes and Guillén show that even though the poetry of these writers emerges in different contexts their poetry share essential similarities in their expressions of the Black Atlantic: the expression of a collective subject’s experience of slavery and displacement, the experience of double consciousness, and the aspiration for a whole identity, which can either, or simultaneously, be a desire of belonging to a national identity or to a cosmopolitan identity. Furthermore the analysis displays that the poems express a belonging to a certain kind of ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in which the subject’s experience of not belonging and the unification in the dispersion is fundamental; this rootless world identity is in itself a manifestation of the Black Atlantic culture which Gilroy describes.

Demographic and Health Surveys from 2015-16 as well as previous research suggest that a majority of women in Tanzania justify intimate partner violence (IPV) and that such violence is very prevalent. Semi-structured interviews with women in rural and urban Babati, Tanzania, were conducted in February-March 2016, in which women gave conditional answers to questions on justification of IPV. The aim of this thesis is thus to offer a theoretical explanation for the ambivalence informants expressed regarding IPV. To do so, the theory of double consciousness, which has not been applied to gender issues before, was applied in a qualitative content analysis of informants’ statements. This thesis will argue that double consciousness offers a plausible explanation for the conditional answers given by informants, since they reflected a two-ness among women, in the form of non-justification of IPV, but ideas about women’s obligations that are incompatible with ideals of gender equality. Women are thus aware of the gender oppression, while they still, to some extent, adapt to it.

In the first chapter of Crossing the River (1993), Caryl Phillips depicts the dilemma of a fluid identity for the peoples of the African diaspora and their descendants by using ambiguity to simulate feelings of contradiction, liminality and a double consciousness. The first character, Nash Williams, struggles with his cultural identity as an emancipated, black slave and missionary who is repatriated in Africa to convert the pagans of Liberia. A postcolonial reading of Nash’s hybrid position illustrates his experiences of unhomeliness, of religious doubt and realisation in the shortcomings of mimicry. The second character, Amelia Williams is divided by her dual identity as the wife of a slave owning-slave liberator in antebellum America. Via a contrapuntal reading of Amelia as the antagonist of the tale, her hostile manner supports the suggestion that she sought to control the peculiar situation which was threatening her livelihood, depreciating her social status and debasing her imperialist values. Her proslavery standpoint could not, however, be established unequivocally. Nevertheless, both Amelia and Nash are unmistakably troubled by inner conflicts engendered through slavery and polarised ideologies.

Through this study, I aim to expand the body of knowledge related to Black counter-framing strategies employed in the United States. In this extended case study, I examine the ways in which young Black cis-hetero male creators living in Atlanta, Georgia employ the use of counter-frames to navigate and resist the dominant white racial frame. Specifically, I analyze their use of double consciousness, freedom, and alchemical capitalism as counter-frames as resistance. I advocate for a nuanced approach to examining resistance strategies that includes embracing imperfect and incomplete acts of resistance. By examining these resistance strategies, despite their faults, perhaps we can continue working toward a more complete eradication of oppression.