Rereading William Melvin Kelley

Yannick Blec (1)

1 LISAA - Littératures, Savoirs et Arts

As an African American writer who was part of the Black Arts Movement, William Melvin Kelley became an ardent defender of Black identity/-ies and the Black Aesthetics. This article aims to revisit his narratives through the scopes of African Existential Philosophy and a phenomenological approach in order to understand how he perceived and constructed Black identities in the context of segregation. At the cross-road between imagination and lived experience, his stories interrogate what constitutes the self as an existing Black body filled with individual and community essence.

Mots clés: William Melvin Kelley; Africana existential philosophy; phenomenology

Domaines: Littératures

Yannick Blec. Rereading William Melvin Kelley: Black Identity Construction in the Light of an Africana Existentialist and Phenomenological Approach. Black Studies Papers, 2016, Current Perspectives in Transnational Black Studies, 2.1, pp.99-112. ⟨hal-01342881⟩