| Abstrakt: |
This article focuses on the literary works on African-American memoirs and the sociological imagination. In his classic writing on the sociological imagination, by C. Wright Mills encouraged sociologists to envision society as more than a set of abstract postulates, more than codified empirical data. He knew that the relevancy of the discipline lay in its potential to bring meaning to personal lives. They implicitly use the sociological imagination to connect autobiography with the wider context of prevailing social institutions, mores, and ideological views. With Black Ice, Lorene Cary explores the issue of maintaining ethnic identity in the midst of an assimilating social environment, namely, an elite college preparatory school. As a title, Black Ice suggests Cary's "coolness" as she is tugged and tussled by a seemingly endless stream of conflicting loyalties. In Colored People, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. paints a vibrant and often ribald canvas of the African-American citizens of Piedmont, West Virginia, right at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. |
