Politics of Identity and Embodiment in Coates’s Between the World and Me

Abstract

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me is a personal narrative that can convey political message. The racial identity and embodiment are the issues of this research. This researcher attempts to explore how black identity is constructed in America and how black bodies are disembodied in the nation of racial injustice and prejudice. The researcher analyzes politics of identity and embodiment of the African American to find out how African Americans’ physical structures are treated. Although there were many policies for the harmony and freedom of African American they have not put in implementation. African American people are still enforced to live in unjust society and created the situation of violence between two races. Precarious values and assumptions of the white American determine the African American identity. Coates’s work serves as a revolutionary text that enables readers to perceive American experience through the eyes of individuals who have been marginalized by its culture. The suppressed identity and disembodiment correspond to African American that substantiate with the concept from Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness. Double consciousness is the belief that the African Americans in the United States live with two conflicting identities those cannot be entirely merged together. This research also evaluates white peoples’ treatment towards black people and African American’s experience as it pertains to race. It also draws ideas from Stuart Hall’s The Spectacle of the Others to examine white; perspectives towards the black people. This memoir is full of rich culture of empowerment and courage in the face of constant violence and othering.