Shattering Shackles and Shaping Stories

African American and Indian Dalit writings, geographically distant and culturally apart, have emerged as distinctive literary discourses born out of the vivified perceptiveness of the writers in these genres. As they have been kept at the fringes of the hegemonic culture, their existence becomes peripheral in literature too. This book offers a close analysis of the fiction and non-fiction works of Toni Morrison and select Indian Dalit writers, that represent African American and Dalit lives respectively. It traces a comparative analogy between their plights with a purported aim of better value addition to the work of Toni Morrison in India. Morrison, the first American woman of colour to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, has advanced the African American literary canon "by producing unselfconscious works has earned a heartfelt popular and critical approval through their universal appeal" (Anderson, The Guardian).