페미니즘 비판의 경계를 넘어: 흑인역사의 재고찰에 관한텍스트로 이슈마엘 리드의 『무모한 응시』 읽기

Abstract

Robert Elliot Fox and Bruce Allen Dick have contended that Reed’s seventh novel Reckless Eyeballing has weakened his literary authority achieved as a postmodernism writer for his later anti-feminist writing preferences found in his seventh novel. However, this essay attempts to discuss that their arguments with the novel somewhat overlook the diverse possibilities to understand the text within thematic multiplicity for their massive attention to the stereotyped image of Reed as an anti-feminist and misogynist. Reed reveals that Reckless Eyeballing is not the critical site of anti-feminist but the text of how to recover the African American historical event dishonestly manipulated by the mainstream and even put in the crisis of amnesiac state. Reed’s novel indeed reconsiders historical events such as the murder of a young African American Emmett Till and a Jewish American Leo Frank in a way to criticize the distortion and perversion of the ethnic American histories by the mainstream such as Becky French, satirical version of Susan Brownmiller and even their amnesiac state of minority histories. Creating a problematic African American character Ian Ball, Reed also presents the core issue of African American intellectual community whose all the problems with historical representations are closely related to the assimilation into the mainstream with success as a prominent writer. However, by suggesting Ball who has never been conversant with his own ethnic heritage and history, Reed stresses that it is essential for black intellectuals like Ball to (re)inscribe African American history in their mind with fully understanding it. In doing so, Reed believes that African American can be a proper subject to establish the truth of his or her own history as a way to resist the distortion and perversion of the history caused by the mainstream.