Feminist bildungsroman in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Toni Cade Bambara's The Lesson

Literature is an effective cultural and historical document employed as a means for the expression of human experiences. This fact has been uniquely the case of the ethnic communities largely growing within the American society including African and Mexican communities for whom literature becomes a major tool for self-preservation as well as self-expression. Women of colour in American society are discriminated against in terms of poverty, gender and race. Therefore, novelists of different ethnic backgrounds have allowed women of colour, who are disregarded for their class and race, to have their histories read and their voices heard. African American literature kept its survival for long periods while Mexican American literature began to realize itself when Mexico lost the northern territory to the United States of America following the Mexican War in the late 1940s. Both communities either became American citizens or went to some other places outside the USA. These immigrants remained disremembered and their African or Chicano culture had been neglected. Additionally, they experienced discrimination, loss of identity and freedom, racism as well as sexism. In their writings, some woman writers illustrated issues related to such concepts. Audre Lord, Sandra Cisneros and Toni Cade Bambara are among the best examples of writers of mixed ethno-cultural backgrounds to demonstrate the hardships of their lives in their novels. Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Toni Cade Bambara's The Lesson offer the chance to discover indeterminacy in Feminism where it converges with Bildungsroman, which is the focal point of this thesis.