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Post Colonial Conventions in Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

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Post Colonial Conventions in Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Post Colonial Conventions In Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, there are post colonial conventions shown. On Chegg.com, post colonialism is defined as “the study of the legacy of the era of European, and sometimes American, direct global domination, which ended roughly in the mid – 20th century, and the residual political, socio – economic, and psychological effects of that colonial history. Post colonialism examines the manner in which emerging societies grapple with the challenges of self – determination and how they incorporate or reject the Western norms and conventions, such as legal or political systems, left in place after direct administration by colonial powers ended.” In Go Tell it on the Mountain, Baldwin shows the insidious effects of systemic racism, producing us a glimpse of the inhumanity that’s the second and third generation result of the era of American slavery that took place from the period of colonization through the American Civil War. The novel’s characters are only slightly removed, a generation or two, from their slave ancestors. In part II of the novel, it shows that Gabriel’s and Florence’s mother was a slave, and was freed only by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil war. From slavery, the characters from the novel suffer a set of physical, psychological and social circumstances. For example, Gabriel and Florence have siblings that they would never know of, because their siblings were taken away from their mother for various reasons, like having to do with their slavery, therefore their race, status and circumstances.
These consequences of the American slave era and other vestiges of this period that survived the Proclamation and the war constitute the racism that Baldwin shows in Go Tell in on the Mountain. In its second and third generation, the slave – psyche racism, is a racism based on the notion that one group of people is socially, genetically, and intentionally superior to another. This form of racism

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