This paper underscores the crucial role of heritage awareness in the ongoing struggle for liberation and social affirmation of African American communities. It critically examines the correlation between black cultural and spatial memory and the fight for social equality in Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s work Happy Land, illustrating how heritage awareness and preservation function as foundations for identity, resistance, and social dignity. Through the novel, it tries to make the case on how memory and heritage empower resistance and can empower the ongoing pursuit of equality for African Americans. The study also observes that dominant groups often shape historical narratives to their advantage, marginalizing minorities and depriving the latter of the benefits embedded in their own history. Thus, passing down black heritage through storytelling empowers marginalized African Americans communities to reclaim and preserve their ancestral legacy and assert their claim to collective ownership of the American land. Through a psychoanalytic lens, the study explores how the affirmation of heritage not only fosters a sense of belonging and entitlement but also restores dignity to African Americans.

Medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field, analyzes illness narratives to study the representation of disease, medicine and medical professionals. Among the illness memoirs, the patient as well as the doctor narratives became popular, as majority of the readers experienced a therapeutic relief of their hidden fears related with disease and death. The victory of modern medicine, challenges faced by the medical professionals and the doctor-patient relationship are the main themes of medical memoirs. The present study focuses on the doctor memoirs and it tries to study how far bioethical concepts have influenced the depiction of medical experience by doctors.