The Camaraderie of Influence

doi:10.1017/9781009314206.010

Chapter 7 - The Camaraderie of Influence

Intersectional Trauma in Down These Mean Streets

from Part II - Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2025

Trent Masiki

Edited by

John Alba Cutler and

Marissa López

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John Alba Cutler: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Marissa López: Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles

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Summary

Just as Song of Solomon and Down These Mean Streets inspired Junot Díaz to become a writer, Youngblood (1954), a novel by the radical African American author John Oliver Killens, inspired Piri Thomas to write Down These Mean Streets (1967). What does Thomas’s personal relationship with Killens reveal about the intertextual relationship between DTMS and Youngblood? What can we learn from reading DTMS as a coming-of-age memoir rather than as a coming-of-age novel? What can be gained by reading DTMS from a child-centered perspective? Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s concept of literary ancestry, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, Gerard Genette’s definition of intertextuality, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying, I argue that the shared themes of racial, sexual, and gendered trauma intertextually bind the homosocial coming-of-age narratives in DTMS and Youngblood. I examine how the coming-of-age narratives in each of these texts explore the entanglement of homosocial camaraderie and ethnic, racial, and sexual identity formation. In critically explicating these themes, this chapter expands Latino American and African American literary history and reveals new insights about the intertextual genealogy of influence between DTMS and Youngblood.

Keywords

Afro-Latino African American memoir autobiography Black aesthetic intertextuality trauma race ethnicity sexuality gender

Type: Chapter
Information: Latinx Literature in Transition, 1848–1992 , pp. 126 - 142

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314206.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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