Investigating Blackness in the United States through the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Abstract: My final dissertation takes into exam the challenges of being black in the United States, as they are narrated in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work. The thesis is divided into three chapters, each one focusing on a book by Coates. The first chapter is about The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir in which the author writes about his early years spent in the neighborhood of Mondawmin in Baltimore. The following chapter analyzes Coates’s second memoir, Between the World and Me, which the author writes as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son Samori. In the book, the author explores the issues of racism and white supremacy in America and describes his own journey of personal discovering within American society. The final chapter focuses on Coates’s first novel, The Water Dancer, set on a plantation in Antebellum America. Through fiction, the author tells the story of Hiram, a young man born into bondage who is gifted with a photographic memory and with the power of Conduction. In the course of the novel, Coates deals with the topics of memory, love, loss, and freedom.