Chergui, MalekBenatmane, HadjerZerrouki, Zina2022-10-092022-10-092022http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/13516Throughout history racism was the major issue in the United States as well as the major problematic for many African American writers, in which they used to write about it in different forms such as poem, verse,and even songs in order to dipict their life and their suffering to struggle the whites segregation and racial prejudices. This research is a study of Maya Angelou's first autobiography I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). It centers on the issue of racism as a major theme in the book.The initial aim of this study is to examine the contribution of Maya Angelou in portraying the issue racism and it's the effects on the life of blacks in the United States borrowing from the concepts developed in psychoanalysis. To infer the extent to which racism affects the characters of the novel, we relied on Du Bois's theory of the double consciousness and inferiority complex. The Second objective is to examine the theme of displacement and how it works, in novel according to Freud's notion of defense mechanism as a means of help for the characters to transcend the problem of racism.enRacismdisplacementMaya Angelou'sOther