Beyond the Body: A Discursive Contemplation of Black American Identity

Abstract

Beyond the Body; A Discursive Contemplation of Black American Identity is a meditation upon the discursive underpinnings of racial identity within the American consciousness and its transformation over a hundred-year period. Through a close reading of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, this paper seeks to explore the discursive evolution of Blackness across three historical moments when the Black American identity was under threat. The author of each text bestows the reader with a vision of America’s future that is at once fragile and entangled with the memory of the nation’s past. To sift meaning within this entanglement of memory and intention, Beyond the Body situates the study of the above texts within the broader discursive framing of the American identity through the American Dream.