Double Voiceness of African Americans

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“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk According to Charles Bressler, African-American literature consists of something called the “double voiceness-that African-American literature draws on two voices and cultures, the white and the black. It is the joining of these two discourses that produces the uniqueness of African-American literature” (Bressler 218). In Olaudah Equiano’s Equiano’s Travels and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, both authors address the horrific nature of the middle passage, which was the triangular route of the trade of Africans into the Americas. Yet, both authors produce a different discourse on this subject, as both protagonists, within the stories, struggle with “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”, as Du Bois so eloquently wrote. Bressler also defines binary oppositions as the “western philosophy … of opposing centers, [in that] one concept is superior and defines itself by its opposite or inferior center” (Bressler 111) It can also be viewed, within the context of African-American literature, in that binary oppositions are indeed in affect and within those binary oppositions, an understanding can be found within the two stories. By examining the double voiceness, the double consciousness, and the binary oppositions, found within the texts of the two books, a deeper understanding of the horrors and the implications of those horrors of the middle passage may be
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