Overcoming Marginalization and Discovering Identity through Literacy in Representative Works of Multi-Ethnic Literature

In a study of multicultural literature, the dominance of ignorance and prejudice in propagating and perpetuating oppression and marginalization of others is all too common, as is the denial or suppression of the identity of decolonized peoples. We even see the rewriting of history in favor of those in power; whereas the ideas of the oppressed are suppressed, as is the truth. Furthermore, the African writer Chinua Achebe "has spoken of the imperative need for writers to help change the way the colonized world was seen, to tell their own stories, to wage 'a battle for the mind with colonialism' by 're-educating' readers" (qtd. in Boehmer 189). From the perspective of this thesis, there is far too much in common in the negative treatment of the oppressed, whether by slavery or colonialism and its after-effects. In both, however, we see literature as a common and important tool in coping with and overcoming the abuse and oppression faced by the marginalized. Examples abound of the power of literacy and literature in overcoming oppression from the American slave autobiography, post-slavery literary depictions of racism in the Jim Crow era, and the postcolonialism of India. This thesis examines three seemingly disparate postcolonial scenarios from the common angle of the power of the word as revealed in examining this literature from multicultural and transnational views