The Romanticization of Culture as a Force for Good: Maya Angelou’s Vision for a Better World

This article decodes the diacritics of the map of culture clash or what the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie termed the “The danger of a single story” (2009) by introducing a line of thought whereby American blacks and whites can rethink the sense of disorientation associated with the black and white cultures to avoid cultural discrimination, dissolve cultural boundaries, and build up patterns for a cultural compromise. Through delving into the legacy of Maya Angelou (1928-2014), one can formulate the tenets of a manifesto for romanticizing culture. Romanticizing culture is a critical endeavor for a possibility of bridging cultural gaps to fulfill cultural harmony through the dissemination of liberal aesthetics, secularism, and a cultural newness to eradicate cultural fetishism and cast aside projections of otherness. It is a process of self-recovery which involves a jump over the deformed reality through the spread of mystic aesthetics to escape from the hostility images that prevents American blacks and whites from a spiritual self-consciousness. It can, above all, provide a possibility of a new mind-set towards fullness and perfection. Angelou’s manifesto of romanticizing culture comprises these tenets: the poetics of mysticism, the hybrid aesthetic of “rasquachismo”, a notion coined by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto calling for breaking the magnifying glass that doubles the scale of cultural tensions, and the accentuation of the positive and elimination of the negative, a mode of thought that can mitigate projections of otherness.