The Mulatto and Tabooed Desires: Reading James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay interrogates the dominant discourse of a mixed-race man's sexuality under Jim Crow and its counter-discourse by exploring James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Recent scholarship on the novel presents Johnson's text as a somewhat conservative text in which the protagonist's alleged deviation from normative racial identity and heterosexuality prefigures his tragic fate. Scholars such as Siobhan B. Somerville and Phillip Brian Harper contend that Johnson's portrayal of his mulatto protagonist as a homosexual subject conforms to the logic of dominant white discourse in which homosexual and interracial sexuality are tabooed and stigmatized. Against those critical assessments of Johnson's novel as a male version of the tragic mulatta narrative, my essay argues that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges the cultural politics of racial segregation that racializes and sexualizes a light skinned black male subject. In doing so, I examine Johnson's rhetorical strategy through which, I suggest, his narrative actually troubles the racist fantasy that pathologizes the protagonist's biracial origins and sexuality. Specifically, I explore Johnson's appropriation and strategic deployment of racist stereotypes associated with a mixed-race man, arguing that Johnson's use of racist discourses criticizes rather than reifies the conservative politics that critics generally identify in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.
Abstract
This essay interrogates the dominant discourse of a mixed-race man's sexuality under Jim Crow and its counter-discourse by exploring James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Recent scholarship on the novel presents Johnson's text as a somewhat conservative text in which the protagonist's alleged deviation from normative racial identity and heterosexuality prefigures his tragic fate. Scholars such as Siobhan B. Somerville and Phillip Brian Harper contend that Johnson's portrayal of his mulatto protagonist as a homosexual subject conforms to the logic of dominant white discourse in which homosexual and interracial sexuality are tabooed and stigmatized. Against those critical assessments of Johnson's novel as a male version of the tragic mulatta narrative, my essay argues that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges the cultural politics of racial segregation that racializes and sexualizes a light skinned black male subject. In doing so, I examine Johnson's rhetorical strategy through which, I suggest, his narrative actually troubles the racist fantasy that pathologizes the protagonist's biracial origins and sexuality. Specifically, I explore Johnson's appropriation and strategic deployment of racist stereotypes associated with a mixed-race man, arguing that Johnson's use of racist discourses criticizes rather than reifies the conservative politics that critics generally identify in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.
참고문헌 (22)
- Cheng, Anne Anlin, "The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief" (2001), Oxford UP
- Clarke, Cheryl, "Professions of Desire" (1995), MLA
- Fabre, Michel., "From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980" (1993), U of Illinois P
- Freud, Sigmund, "The Completed Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol XIV" (1957), Hogarth Press
- Fuss, Diana, "Identification Papers" (1995), Routledge
- Gunning, Sandra, "Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912" (1996), Oxford UP
- Hale, Grace Elizabeth, "Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940" (1999), Pantheon Book
- Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, "Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching" (1993), Columbia UP
- Harper, Phillip Brian, "Are We not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity" (1996), Oxford UP
- Hartman, Saidiay V., "Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America" (1997), Oxford UP
- Hodes, Martha, "White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South" (1997), Yale UP
- Johnson, James Weldon, "Along This Way, Writings: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Along This Way, Essays and Editorials, Selected Poems" (2004), Library of America
- Johnson, James Weldon., "Black Manhattan" (1991), Da Capo Press
- Johnson, James Weldon, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (1989), Random House
- Levine, Lawrence W., "Race Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom" (2007), Oxford UP
- Levy, Eugene, "James Weldon Johnson : Black Leader, Black Voice" (1973), U of Chicago P
- Locke, Alain, "The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance" (1992), Simon & Schuster
- Lott, Eric, "Love and Theft : Blackface Minstrelsy & the American Working Class" (2013), Oxford UP
- Painter, NellIrvin, "The Evolution of Southern Culture" (1988), U of Georgia P
- Somerville, Siobhan B., "Queering the Color Line : Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture" (2000), Duke UP
- Vechten, Carl Van, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson", pp.xxxiii~xxxviii (1927), Random House
- Žižek, Slavoj, "The Žižek Reader" (1999), Blackwell