Dimensions of the Sociopsychological Alienation of the African American in Baldwin’s Mountain and Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

Abstract

Re-appropriating the Marxist concepts of Alienation and Estrangement, this paper examines the dimensions of the sociopsychological (sociological and psychological) alienation of the African American as portrayed in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (Mountain) and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (TWBP). As depicted in the two novels, the African American, as a result of his racial difficulty in America, is alienated from himself, his family, and the society. Thus, while critics would argue that these two African American writers are different from each other in their artistic presentations, this paper avers that they complement each other by their involvement in the racial problems of Black Americans through the medium of their imaginative works. The paper further contends that the two writers also complement each other by their re-appropriation of the Marxist concept of alienation and estrangement. While the alienation of an individual in Marxism is the result of industrialisation, the paper argues that as depicted in the selected works it is the skin colour of the major characters that is responsible for their sociopsychological alienation. In this way, the paper demonstrates how the two novelists simultaneously engage and reformulate the Marxist concept of alienation/estrangement within the framework of the racial experience of the African American in America.