Migration and Blackness in James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996) and Bessie Head’s The Cardinals (1995)

Abstract

This research examines the issue of migration and blackness in James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996) and Bessie Head’s The Cardinals (1992). By drawing the affinities between the two works, we intended to argue that the experience of racism is similarly lived by the African Americans and the South African Blacks. To achieve our purpose, we relied on the theoretical guidelines of Stephen Steinberg’s theory on racism as it is developed in America Again at the Crossroads (2000). The study revealed that the two societies have maintained a policy of land exclusion that resulted in both economic and social exclusion. The two works explore in a similar way the movement of the blacks from their restricted areas to the considered Promised Land of the white man’s cities in search for freedom and their struggle for assimilation in two racist societies that associate Blackness with criminality and inferiority.