ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
July 2001
Tama Carstensen and Katrina Ball

In this article, Cudjoe explains the use of autobiography in African-American literature, especially for African-American women. Cudjoe suggests that African-American autobiographies are so important to the culture for a number of reasons: it was often their only avenue of control; the word (written or spoken) is an essential part of African-Americans’ lives; the truth of the autobiography is not as important as whether it represents the culture. Prior to the 1970s, African-American women were unable to be heard because the white literary establishment only allowed few blacks into their ranks, and men took these spaces. Cudjoe examines African-American women’s rise in literature, beginning in the 1970s, through Maya Angelou’s autobiographies as a representation of all African-American women.

In this article, Danahay compares the use of silence in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory. Danahay suggests that these authors’ use of silence creates a "symbolic violence" as a form of resistance. While silence has previously been considered a symbol of victimization, Angelou’s silence, Kingston’s breaking of silence, Rodriguez’s ambivalence toward silence" (66), and the authors’ need to write about them, move the texts from a form of resistance to hegemony to symbolic violence against domination. Danahay further disputes the use of the term "ethnic" to describe writings, stating that the term itself marginalizes the texts by giving in to the dominant culture’s perspective of difference.

Estes-Hicks, Onita. "The Way We Were: Precious Memories of the Segregated South." African-American Review 27.1 (1993): 9-19.

This article chronicles the treatment of the South in African-American autobiography. Estes-Hicks begins with Richard Wright's Black Boy, which follows the pattern of a traditional slave narrative: an escape from the oppressive South and a journey towards freedom and identity in the North. Estes-Hicks tracks a change in attitude toward the South that occurs after Black Boy, such as in Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where Angelou writes reminiscently about the simple pleasures of her girlhood home in Stamps, Arkansas. In 1988, Dorothy Spruill Redford published Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage, marking a return to the richness of African-American culture that was abandoned in the face of Southern racism and hatred. Estes-Hicks explores numerous other texts that document this sense of loss and "forced flight" from Southern homes and families.  * This article can be accessed online through EBSCOhost.

Gilbert examines the new literary tradition that Angelou creates. Gilbert hypothesizes that Angelou uses part Southern literature, part Bildungsroman, and part Black tradition to tell her story. According to Gilbert, Angelou’s text comes from the perspective of the child and the experienced adult writer. The child, Marguerite, brings the point of view of childhood innocence and shows her confusion in the behavior of the adults around her, while Angelou the adult writer provides instruction to the reader using experience and retrospection. Gilbert also examines Angelou’s use of language: her varied use of black colloquialisms and stiff literary discourse. Gilbert claims that Angelou has not created a typical model of African-American culture, but that she has created a heroic model of triumph over tremendous odds.

Kinnamon, Keneth. "Call and Response: Intertextuality in Two Autobiographical Works by Richard Wright and Maya Angelou." Modern Critical Interpretations: Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. 69-79.

In this article, Kinnamon compares and contrasts Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Wright's Black Boy, both texts being African-American autobiographies. Kinnamon proposes that the gender of the authors accounts for the ways in which they treat their memories of growing up in the segregated and racist South. He emphasizes the similarities of Angelou's and Wright's childhood and points out that Angelou's text, while it finds fault with the culture of the South, is a monument to the Southern black community. Quite differently, though, Kinnamon shows how Black Boy scorns the entire South, including the Black part. Kinnamon remarks that Angelou's autobiography is a "response" to Wright's autobiographical "call."

In this criticism, Lionnet examines Angelou's autobiography as literature (i.e., fiction). She compares the Angelou in the novel to a Moll Flanders-type heroine. Lionnet interprets Angelou's novel (and Angelou's character) in three segments: Angelou's characters as heroines, her use of language and silence, and her manner of falling back on traditional black narrators' use of oral traditions and avoidance of truth through poetry, ghost stories, and fantasy. Lionnet suggests that Angelou, in writing predominantly to a white audience, is distanced from this community. However, the community understands the "tactics" and "stratagems" that she is required to use.

In this article, Neubauer chronicles Angelou's life through her poetry and five autobiographies.  She summarizes Angelou's focus in these works. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Neubauer concentrates on Angelou's feelings of displacement, geographically with her movement from Stamps to St. Louis, back to Stamps and to California, and emotionally with her lack of a family setting in her life, except when she is with Momma and Uncle Willie. Angelou's next three novels discuss her trials as a single mother trying to find the perfect man so that she can attain the romanticized Hollywood-type life that she considers a normal existence. Angelou realizes that her son is displaced, just as she was as a child, and that she can do nothing to alleviate the problem. She eventually realizes that Guy's home is wherever she is and that geography is not a serious factor. Angelou's poetry ranges from the struggles of African-Americans to more personal stories of her family.

Tangum, Marion M., and Marjorie Smelstor. "Hurston's and Angelou's Visual Art: The Distancing Vision and the Beckoning Gaze." Southern Literary Journal 31.1 (1998): 80-98.

Tangum and Smelstor examine Zora Neale Hurston's and Maya Angelou's texts in terms of visually looking at the characters in these two autobiographical works by African-American women. According to this article, both Hurston and Angelou pull their readers into the text, and then push the readers away from the text. Moments of intense "gazing" into the eyes of Janie and Marguerite keep the audience connected to the story, while moments of "distancing vision" keep readers at bay from wholly participating in the experiences of the characters. Tangum and Smelstor argue that Hurston's writing significantly impacted Angelou's and this explains some of the intertextuality found between the two texts.  * This article can be accessed online through EBSCOhost.

This article explores the issue of rape in Jacob's and Angelou's autobiographies, and more specifically, it explores the black woman's experience of rape being told through written language. Vermillion posits that in these literary accounts of rape, Jacobs and Angelou distance themselves from their bodies and then "reembody" themselves through the use of words. The reason for disembodiment, according to Vermillion, is the assault on the woman's body, and the subsequent cloak of shame that society wraps around her body. In Jacob's text, Linda Brent is a slave woman who is in constant danger of being raped by Dr. Flint, her white owner. Vermillion points out that Brent takes control over her body by choosing to have sex with Mr. Sands and by thwarting Dr. Flint. Likewise, in Angelou's text, Marguerite Johnson suffers the ordeal of being raped by Mr. Freeman, and she then recovers autonomy over her body by gaining control firstly over her own voice and over words. Then, she goes even further by asking a boy to have sex with her and becoming pregnant. Vermillion views these acts as a celebration of the "black female body."

Walker, Pierre A. "Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." College Literature 22.3 (1995): 91-109.

In this article, Walker studies the ways in which Angelou rises to the challenge that her editor, Robert Loomis, gave her: to create an autobiographical text in literary fashion. Walker argues that Angelou's text functions primarily as protest against racial injustices and inequalities, and that African-American literature has always been strongly political. Walker emphasizes the "form" and "thematic unity" of Angelou's text to reveal its literary nature, as opposed to a merely episodic autobiographical account (3). Walker points out that Angelou arranges her text in a thematic way, focusing her chapters around ideas like identity, racial pride, words, and protest. Also, as Walker states, the chapters seem to follow one another and link each other in a thematic progression rather than adhering to chronological order. These facets of Angelou's autobiography are clearly literary, and as Walker so emphatically attests, they are a testament to her great accomplishment and her meeting of Loomis' challenge. * This article can be accessed online through EBSCOhost.