The present work deals with the representation of trauma and violence in coming-of-age stories
written by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women authors in the United States. The kinds of
violence explored in this work are related to the post-colonial condition the women
protagonists experience in which racism sexism classism among other kinds of discrimination
are co-created in an intersectional experience of oppression. The titles analyzed in this work
are: Lucy (1990) written by Jamaica Kincaid Breath Eyes Memory (1994) written by Edwidge
Danticat Bone Black - Memories of Girlhood (1996) written by bell hooks and God Help the
Child (2015) written by Toni Morrison. The Bildungsroman genre serves as the form with which
the authors are able to display the different forms of violence experienced during the the
process of growing up female and black in the United States and also in the Caribbean islands
of Antigua and Haiti in the cases of Kincaid and Danticat respectively. The coming-of-age
stories written by women and more specifically by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women
tend to showcase narratives in which the tensions between the protagonists' self-determination
and the influence of social and cultural factors in their development opportunities are
negotiated. The genre is adapted and subverted by the authors deviating from its canonical
European origins becoming a site in which the authors are able to represent different kinds of
violence and the subsequent traumatic consequences caused by it.
