FROM SLAVERY TO CIVIL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL EQUALITY: THE ROLE OF LITERATURE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL LIBERATION – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE STAGES OF FORMATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ROMA LITERATURE
FROM SLAVERY TO CIVIL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL EQUALITY: THE ROLE OF LITERATURE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL LIBERATION – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE STAGES OF FORMATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ROMA LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: The artistic struggle of a people for whom the art of writing represented, at times, a crime, for whom the power to create valuable artistic works was seen as biologically impossible, and which, for several centuries, was perceived as one without a language, without writing, and without history started to take shape as a collective enterprise in the first half of the 20th century and still continues today. In the attempt to gain a better understanding of what the concepts of African American literature and Roma literature mean today, and, most importantly, to identify the stages of their formation as well as their permanent relationship of mutual influence with the socio-historical reality from the United States of America and the Romanian territories throughout time, the present paper will provide a non-exhaustive presentation of the directions followed by the various forms of African American and Roma cultural expression both as part of the oral tradition and of the written literature of these two minority groups. The focus of the paper will be to comprehend, through the comparative method, the degree to which the formation and the evolution of ethnic literature created by writers of African American and Roma origins was influenced by the legal and social position of each minority group inside the host nation and, in this way, to trace the similitude as well as the differences between the literary contributions of the two groups in certain moments of history.

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