Voice, Marriage, and Racial Justice: Black Feminist Resistance in Tayari Jones' An American Marriage

Tayari Jones's An American Marriage (2018) has been widely acclaimed for its exploration of love, loyalty, and the devastating impact of wrongful incarceration on African American communities. While much scholarship has emphasized Roy's imprisonment as a critique of systemic racism, less attention has been given to Celestial, whose struggles illuminate a different but equally urgent narrative. This study fills that gap by analyzing the novel in terms of Black feminist resistance and with reference to three interrelated themes: Voice, Marriage, and racial justice. The theoretical perspectives of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Dorothy Roberts, and Kimberle Crenshaw are put into practice by the researcher using a qualitative textual analysis. Celestial letters and artistic activities are viewed as survival and resistance because Lorde insisted on turning silence into words. The critique of family and institutional control offered by Collins and Roberts points to the fact that Celestial opposes patriarchal expectations of Marriage. The intersectionality of Crenshaw uncovers the position of her having to carry the added weight of systematic racism despite her not being incarcerated herself. The results confirm that the story of Celestial is a strong place of resistance, whereby she reinvents loyalty, asserting autonomy and contesting the fact that Black women are shunned and silenced in private and public realms. Re-centering Celestial, the study becomes part of the Black feminist literature criticism since it demonstrates that An American Marriage is not only a novel of racial injustice but also a celebration of the strengths and power of Black women. Finally, the study broadens the discourse on the topic, establishing the work by Jones as an essential input to the twenty-first-century African American feminist literature.