Mental Spaces of Marginalization and Resistance in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings A Discourse-Historical Approach

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is the first of seven autobiographical books by the American author Maya Angelou. The book recounts Angelou’s childhood and adolescence from age 3 through 16. She narrates her unsettled and traumatic childhood through the themes of intimidation, racism, rape, displacement and family. Her adolescence is narrated through themes of empowerment and resistance. The present study adopts a discourse historical approach (DHA) which is primarily concerned with the integration of the social and political backgrounds of the discursive events. Besides, DHA is highly relevant to discourse studies of inequality and national identity. Its analytical categories reveal the discursive construction of 'self' and 'other' in discourse either positively or negatively (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). The paper incorporates the five discursive strategies with Fauconnier's (1985, 1997) Mental Space Theory (MST) which represents the study's cognitive aspect. Mental spaces help illustrate the speakers reality as opposed to their wishes, attitudes and attributes. The study aims to examine how strategies of marginalization and resistance are discursively represented. It also seeks to demonstrate the effect of those strategies on the construction of Angelou’s identity by revealing their conceptual structure. Finally, the study reveals the power imbalance in relationships by examining the notion of marginalization through which intimidation and racism are discursively represented. Confronting these techniques, the analyses shed light on Angelou’s discourse of resistance.