Autobiographical Temporality and the (Un)Making of Blackness in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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This paper explores the “failure” of the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The novel is told in a fictional autobiographical form in which the protagonist, the Ex-Colored Man, narrates his story of how he had abandoned his aspirations to become a Black musician and is now living as an “Ex-Colored” white man. This paper argues that the Ex-Colored Man’s failure is embedded in a crisis that arises from the paradox of African American citizenship. The instability of the form of autobiography, due to its fissured temporality between the written subject and the writer, is used in order to address the failure of the American democratic progress and the Ex-Colored Man’s personal failure as a musician. First, I contextualize this crisis in the historical failure of post-Reconstruction citizenship aggravated by lynching and anti-miscegenation laws. The temporality of the autobiographical form embodies this failure and further questions the notion of democratic progress. Then, I read the scenes of shame and lynching in the novel through José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” to look into the specularization of the Black male body and how it functions in the violent technology of making race. The reflexive temporality of the autobiographical form reflects and complicates the processes of race-making through the spectacle of the Black male body. While this study attempts to historicize the notions of Blackness presented in the novel, it also considers the political and aesthetic significance of the form of fictional autobiography.
Abstract
This paper explores the “failure” of the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The novel is told in a fictional autobiographical form in which the protagonist, the Ex-Colored Man, narrates his story of how he had abandoned his aspirations to become a Black musician and is now living as an “Ex-Colored” white man. This paper argues that the Ex-Colored Man’s failure is embedded in a crisis that arises from the paradox of African American citizenship. The instability of the form of autobiography, due to its fissured temporality between the written subject and the writer, is used in order to address the failure of the American democratic progress and the Ex-Colored Man’s personal failure as a musician. First, I contextualize this crisis in the historical failure of post-Reconstruction citizenship aggravated by lynching and anti-miscegenation laws. The temporality of the autobiographical form embodies this failure and further questions the notion of democratic progress. Then, I read the scenes of shame and lynching in the novel through José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” to look into the specularization of the Black male body and how it functions in the violent technology of making race. The reflexive temporality of the autobiographical form reflects and complicates the processes of race-making through the spectacle of the Black male body. While this study attempts to historicize the notions of Blackness presented in the novel, it also considers the political and aesthetic significance of the form of fictional autobiography.
참고문헌 (26)
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