America's “Corridor of Uncertainty”: Racial Spatiality in the Poetry of Maya Angelou and Lisa Suhair Majaj

Abstract

The interplay between race and space is not a new theme to be visited in literary works especially in those written by authors of multi-ethnic origins. But, with the advance of the interdisciplinary study of Racial Spatiality, the impact of the spatial structure on the network of social relations in multiracial societies has been given more specialized focus. More particularly, the question whether racially mixed societies like the US, in which racist practices have for long been institutionalized, can become raceless has been brought to the fore with the aim of questioning the possibility of replacing the existing racist policies with more race-neutral ones through reassessing the spatial construction of racialized areas in those societies. To this end, the study analyzes the interplay between race and space in the poetry of two ethnic-American women writers, the African American Maya Angelou (1928-2014) and the Arab-American Lisa Suhair Majaj (1960-) by examining the extent to which space in a selected body of their poems is represented as hierarchical, contingent, disputable and/or interactional. This comparative analysis is done with the aim of underscoring the need to push research in the study of racial spatiality towards a comparative approach through which the race-space relationship is more comprehensively examined and assessed.