Interrogation of Official History inWashington's Up from Slavery

Abstract

The interaction of history and literature has been always an important subject among literary scholars. One of the newest approaches in the field of literary criticism is New Historicism. In this almost new way of analysis, not only history affects literature but also literature could be effective in understanding history. So, the relationship between literature and history is reciprocal. This research paper is an attempt to find traces of new historicity in Booker Taliaferro Washington's Up from Slavery by the help of the theories and ideas given by new historicist thinkers like: Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt and Harold Arams Vaesser .In this text, Powerful people dominate lower class people by creating discourse called power in Foucauldian notion of new historicism. It is shown that the margin of society, the blacks have own discourses as whites have. There are subversive voices which resist the dominant culture through which they open a space for the other black men in order to show up themselves. Power as a social energy does not always belong to the whites who have imposing discourse but the blacks also have their own power too is the major finding of this research