Volume VI Special Issue I January 2026

Name of Author : Mrs. P. Veena Spandana, Mrs. K. Prameela Rani

Title of the paper : The Borders of Silence and the Politics of Listening: Unheard Voices, Narrative Innovation, and Cultural Memory in the Works of Jesmyn Ward, Claudia Rankine, and Ta Nehisi Coates, African American Literature

Abstract: This paper is about how contemporary African American writers reimagine silence, borders, and unheard voices. Focusing on Jesmyn Ward, Claudia Rankine, and Ta Nehisi Coates, it highlights their strategies for confronting systemic erasure. Ward foregrounds rural Black voices and intergenerational trauma, Rankine exposes microaggressions and silences within language, and Coates reconstructs erased histories through testimony and speculative forms. Drawing on theories of borders and voice, the study argues that these authors do more than amplify marginalized experiences they challenge and dismantle cultural, linguistic, and historical structures that perpetuate silence. Collectively, their works form a counter archive that resists dominant narratives, broadens African American literary horizons, and redefines the interconnections of voice, silence, and memory in the twenty first century. By engaging silence as both a site of oppression and a source of resistance, these writers transform literature into a space for recovering histories, contesting erasure, and envisioning new possibilities.

Keywords : African American literature, silence, borders, unheard voices, Jesmyn Ward, Claudia Rankine, Ta Nehisi Coates, marginality, counter archive, erasure.

DOI :

Page Number : 73-76