Rereading William Melvin Kelley : Black Identity Construction in the Light of an Africana Existentialist and Phenomenological Approach.

Abstract

As an African American writer who was part of the Black Arts Movement, William Melvin Kelley became an ardent defender of Black identity/-ies and the Black Aesthetics. This article aims to revisit his narratives through the scopes of African Existential Philosophy and a phenomenological approach in order to understand how he perceived and constructed Black identities in the context of segregation. At the cross-road between imagination and lived experience, his stories interrogate what constitutes the self as an existing Black body filled with individual and community essence.