중간 항로와 흑인 정체성의 재개념화: 찰스 존슨의『중간 항로』
The Reconceptualization of the Middle Passage and Black Identity in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage
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The contemporary black authors recreate in their fiction the conditions of slavery and of the Middle Passage to rewrite history and understand it in American and African American culture in general. Though Charles Johnson is often included among them, this thesis argues he is not only revising white masters’ version of history but also resisting other black writers’ revision of the master’s construction of history. He neither denies the harshness of the nation’s racial history nor sees it as the determining fact of black life. Middle Passage refers to the historic transportation of Africans to the New Worlds; it also suggests what happens to an African American as he encounters Western cultural hegemony and a mystical and powerful African ideal. Rutherford Calhoun, the main character, the narrator, and the author of the journal of the Republic, embarking on an American slave trading ship, is forced to play a white man’s colonial game. He carries the ‘cargo,’ the African Allmuseri slaves who emerge as a fantasy of wholeness or a representation of the guilt of slave masters. Rutherford finds himself disillusioned by the skipper, Falcon who embodies the Western imperial oppression and the perspective of dualism, repression and conflict. At first, Rutherford cannot identify with the borders, where culture exists, because he is excluded from every community. He only mediates and constructs himself in between. Through voyage, Rutherford is examined and transforms from victimization to self-actualization. He now seeks a different kind of connection. Crossing cultural boundaries, body boundaries and textual boundaries, Middle Passage crosses borders of containment and identity, eluding fixity and resolution. This contradictory balance and this transitional space is the key to Middle Passage and to Johnson’s contention that the serious fiction is the “decalcification of perception.” Middle Passage is the realization of this liberation of perception.
Abstract
The contemporary black authors recreate in their fiction the conditions of slavery and of the Middle Passage to rewrite history and understand it in American and African American culture in general. Though Charles Johnson is often included among them, this thesis argues he is not only revising white masters’ version of history but also resisting other black writers’ revision of the master’s construction of history. He neither denies the harshness of the nation’s racial history nor sees it as the determining fact of black life. Middle Passage refers to the historic transportation of Africans to the New Worlds; it also suggests what happens to an African American as he encounters Western cultural hegemony and a mystical and powerful African ideal. Rutherford Calhoun, the main character, the narrator, and the author of the journal of the Republic, embarking on an American slave trading ship, is forced to play a white man’s colonial game. He carries the ‘cargo,’ the African Allmuseri slaves who emerge as a fantasy of wholeness or a representation of the guilt of slave masters. Rutherford finds himself disillusioned by the skipper, Falcon who embodies the Western imperial oppression and the perspective of dualism, repression and conflict. At first, Rutherford cannot identify with the borders, where culture exists, because he is excluded from every community. He only mediates and constructs himself in between. Through voyage, Rutherford is examined and transforms from victimization to self-actualization. He now seeks a different kind of connection. Crossing cultural boundaries, body boundaries and textual boundaries, Middle Passage crosses borders of containment and identity, eluding fixity and resolution. This contradictory balance and this transitional space is the key to Middle Passage and to Johnson’s contention that the serious fiction is the “decalcification of perception.” Middle Passage is the realization of this liberation of perception.
참고문헌 (18)
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