게일 존스의 『콜레지도라』: 흑인 여성의 몸, 기억, 그리고 블루스

Abstract

Gayl Jones's Corregidora: Black Woman's Body, Memory, and the Blues Du, Chang Jun Gayl Jones poses questions about the issue of the controlling power of slavery related to contemporary conditions for African American women. Throughout the work, she tries to clarify the ways in which slavery has conditioned the project of black cultural reconstruction. She treats the body of black woman as a product of historical victim as well as a cultural productivity in the novel. In the slavery system, the black woman's body never belongs to her. Her body is possessed by the slave owner as a commodity of the white society. Thus, Jones describes how the black woman's body was victimized by the force of slavery's ideology. As agents of historical preservation, the black women perform the crucial task of remembering the past and transmitting it to the future in Corregidora. In order to make a history for themselves, therefore, the Corregidora women use memory as the medium of historical preservation. Jones also focuses on the blues as an oral mode of the African cultural tradition in the novel. The blues carries the characters' senses of shared suffering. Jones' protagonist in Corregidora, Ursa, thus sings to express a black woman's identity that can contain and transcend the history of slavery.