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Homeward bound: domestic space, identity and political agency in Maya Angelou’s autobiography

2005; University of Alicante; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14198/fem.2005.5.09

1989-9998

Amaya Fernández Menicucci,

Latin American Literature Studies

Maya Angelou's six-volume autobiography 1 is cast across a variety of geographical spaces, from her native California to the small town of Stamps, in rural Arkansas, from the West coast to the Babel of New York, from the United States to Europe and Africa.It is the aim of the present article to explore the relationship established between the narrator's wandering across physical space and the process of self-construction along the narrative journey, by analysing spatial representation as configured through the constant interaction of physical, socio-cultural and political dimensions.Theories of Diaspora have not been the first to acknowledge the coexistence and simultaneous interaction of such dimensions, but they have certainly proved necessary to take into account the individual's perception and representation of geographical space so as to explain the dynamism and ambivalence of their location within socio-cultural spheres of identification or exclusion.Social categories, cultural systems and political practices interweave interactive networks, which individuals cannot elude and which theories of self-construction cannot ignore, since «real lives are forged out of a complex articulation of these categories», as Avtar Brah points in her work Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities 2 .According to recent postcolonial feminist theories 3 , such complexity may be charted out in the same way that physical Feminismo/s, 5,