Abstract

Those mythic structures which have significantly defined and supported the idea of "America" have consistently ignored the contribution, or even the very existence of the American black population. Meaningful participation in the promise of these myths, loosely bound up in the notion of The American Dream, and defined in texts such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, has been systematically denied to America's black population. W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk initiated a vigorous literary attempt to recuperate black self-esteem, to independently fashion black identity, and to create an environment in which blacks and whites could contribute equally in future prosperity and progress. To forward his agenda, Du Bois undertakes a relentless deconstruction of prevalent white American traditional and mythic misconceptions, and imaginatively proposes alternative mythological constructs. This study investigates Du Bois's representation of the significance of myth to the black experience in America, and the discursive response contained in subsequent African-American texts: namely, in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.