Skin and Story: "An Intersectional Exploration of Racial Trauma, Identity, and Displacement in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake"

This article investigated the interplay of historical narratives and racial trauma within literature. Equally disturbing, racialized experiences are disseminated throughout epochal literary pieces, i.e., Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Lahiri’s The Namesake. Using critical race theory as a heuristic device, this manuscript reveals literature’s role in reflecting hegemonic power structures and systemic inequities, this study will reveal that how skin both as a literal and metaphorical boundary functions as a site of both suffering and resilience. To that end, this research closely explored the correlation between narrative form and literary devices with the exposure of skin color and its proximity to or distance from eyes and bodily visibility. With the binding of personal narratives and collective trauma, this investigation concludes the impact of literature on perpetuating imperial power relations. This article also conceptualizes linguistic capital in fostering injurious values, such as patriarchal power imbalances, between different people. This topic collectively strikes dialogical processes about anti-blackness and literature’s role in effecting social change. Mutinously, this discussion also begins to revise the reasoning behind pathways to reimagine more equal life experience for black people.