“Taking Away Your Name Is the First Step”: The Transgenerational Trauma of Slavery and the Shaping of Identity in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

Abstract

[eng] This dissertation aims at analyzing how slavery, racism, and segregation have created a trauma that has contributed to shape the identity of millions of African Americans, and how this trauma has passed on from one generation to another in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016). The increase of trauma studies and trauma fiction has helped to give voice to the millions of souls that suffered the consequences of slavery, and thus pervious literature of the cultural trauma multiplied. The originality of this paper is in that no previous analysis on the reshaping of identity after slavery has been made about the newest transgenerational fiction of Homegoing, which presents a genealogical story through the history of slavery and its consequences on both African and African American population.