RACE AND IDENTITY IN JACQUELINE WOODSON’S BROWN GIRL DREAMING

Abstract

Brown Girl Dreaming, the novel by Jacqueline Woodson, presents her life through a series of poems. This was classified as young adult literature. Most reviewers characterized and appreciated the book both as a human rights narrative of a young brown girl’s coming of age against the socio-political background of racism and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of the 1960s, and as a personal history of her development as a writer. In this article the major focus will be on how Brown Girl Dreaming as both a racial memoir and an autobiographical narrative of identity formation is fleshed out. The novel by Woodson presents a range of important themes, while this paper will focus on racism, in Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming