Challenging Stereotypes: A Study of Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Abstract

Autobiographical acts often are attempts at visibility. The autobiographical works of African American women arise from their socio-historical positions as blacks and females and embody their attempts to gain acceptability. Such works are important documents that serve the socio-political purposes of dispelling common negative images. The present paper concerns itself with how Maya Angelou's first volume of autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) rejects a prominent stereotyping of black women”that of the ‘matriarch' and how it presents them as constituting a unique fraternity called ‘black womanhood.'