dc.description.abstract | This article sought to analyse intersections of voice and
agency in the poetry of Maya Angelou. It explores how
various discourses of marginalization such as those of
gender, race and class inform knowledge production by
marginalized persons as portrayed in Angelou’s poetry. The
article demonstrates how the marginalized appropriate
voice to resist hegemony. This is validated through voice
reclamation and performative subjectivity to articulate
issues of the marginalized as one way of resisting
hegemonic discourses that have governed their parameters
for agency and identity. The data for analysis in this article is
obtained from a critical reading and sampling of poems in
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. Anchored
on the intersectionality theory, the article examines
Angelou’s representation of the Spivakian concept of voice
as appropriated by the marginalized and how in its
intersection with agency, is used as a rhetoric of resistance
in her poetry. | en_US |