The Clash Of Identities In John Updike’s Terrorist, Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, And Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Résumé: The main concern of the actual work is to analyze the issue of identity in multicultural societies. The United States of America is the best example that can be taken for it is a melting pot where people with miscellaneous cultural and religious backgrounds, ethnic diversity, social classifications and most importantly divergent ideological views share the same geographical space. This multicultural social nature leads, undoubtedly, to conflicting situation among the US constellation. The issue related to either individual or even collective identity is the overt and is considered the most serious subject that both the majority and minority groups quarrel over. The present work seeks to stress this identity clash in the US society through literary works that best illustrate the issue namely Maya Angelou’sAll God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes,Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain and John Updike’s novel Terrorist.In order to get deeper into the question of identity clash in a multicultural US society, I adopted a selection of theoriessuch as identity theories, postcolonial theories, double consciousness theory, feminism and Orientalism. Thanks to this notable selection of theories that depict principally the suffering of the Subaltern and the oppressed, I managed to obtain a global overview about the different identity conflicts that afflicts the US society. For the selected authors, identity clash in the US society is an unescapable truth that the oppressed should accept. From the analysis of the three novels, I can arrive at the fact that the inferiorized subjects should reconcile between their identities of origin and their Americaness. There is no way of foregrounding one identity at the expense of another otherwise everything will fall apart. This will automatically lead to identity conflict and crisis which weakens the psyche and aches the spirit. As Du Bois suggests in his Double Consciousness theory, one should mingle between his two antagonist identities to come out with the best of man.By the end of the present thesis, I can safely conclude that identity clash in the US society witnessed a giant transition of conflicts based on race and ethnic features to conflicts based on cultural and religious traits. Therefore, identity conflict is context sentitive.

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