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Abstract
The present paper tries to bring forth an appreciation of Maya Angelou’s use of autobiography as resistance literature. In her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou, rather than focusing on self, focused on race and incorporated several features of Afro- American folk traditions. By incorporating the black oral song tradition, social history and black narratives she rejected the supremacy of the so called Euro-centric autobiography and constructed a new form of autobiography in which she defies the de-humanizing practices by the white people against the blacks, i.e. making the blacks scared of their own blackness, injecting inferiority and destroying their identity by calling them out of their own names. Her depiction of the segregated societies is so vivid that at one cannot deny her autobiography as a mode of postcolonial resistance. It is through this resistance she wrote and brought herself and her people into existence.