Negotiating Racism as a Dehumanizing Experience in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Abstract

The problem of racism is deeply rooted in the American history mainly in the southern societies. This dissertation aims at revealing this issue in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) in an attempt to investigate its ugliest consequences on the blacks’ humanness which is dehumanization. This study adopts the analytical approach. It is found as a helpful tool to explain and examine how racism throughout the novel’s events is a dehumanizing factor. In two chapters, this study tackles a historical background about the blacks’ history in America followed by an analytical one. The latter is dedicated to analyse racism’s dehumanizing effects on the blacks