Psycho-Politics and Identity in the African American Diasporic Novel: A Study of Wright’s Native Son

Abstract

This article aims to highlight diaspora and diasporic identity in the African American
novel. It examines Frantz Fanon’s critical theory of psycho-politics and its application to a
selected African American novel to uncover the effect of slavery and colonization on the African
American psyche that leads to psychological trauma and alienation. This article explores how
African American writers emphasize the politics of the relationship between whites and blacks in
the US, which mimics the colonial relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and thus
the novel can be interpreted in terms of the relationship between post-colonial theory and critical
psychology as explained in Fanon’s definition of anti-colonial struggle, combining politics with
psychology or “psycho-politics”. The article sheds light on the effect of diaspora on the identity
of the African American since identity construction and equality are the crux of the concern of
African Americans. Identity and trauma are intertwined and thus Africans in diaspora live in a
traumatic and apocalyptic age. This article emphasizes that the multi-layered, hybrid identity of
the African American is an effective and inevitable coping mechanism within the context of this
individual’s traumatic experiences.