WRITING IN PRACTICE VOL 10

FULL TITLE

'The people wore no armour, or none that I recognized': How perspective contributes to the exploration of dis/embodiment in Ta-Nahisi Coates's Between the World and Me

ABSTRACT

Considering the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), the text considers the conditions of working from a place of acknowledged subjectivity. In doing so, Coates demonstrates that any notion of working from a ‘universal’ position is a literary fantasy from which writers of colour have been excluded. Coates deploys complex facets of dis/embodiment to evoke the experience of moving through the world in his particular body, while presenting the structural and systemic conditions that preface, and often, obstruct, that movement.

KEYWORDS

memoir, life writing, embodiment, epistolary, perspective, first person, subjectivity

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

Corry, Amie (2024) 'The people wore no armour, or none that I recognized': How perspective contributes to the exploration of dis/embodiment in Ta-Nahisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Writing in Practice. 10. 125-131. DOI: 10.62959/WIP-10-2024-10