“가해자는 판단자가 될 수 없다”: 에드워드 존스의 소설 『 알려진 세계 』에서 인식자 찾기
“The Hitter Can Never Be the Judge”: Identifying the Knower in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World
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This essay discusses how Edward P. Jones endows an illiterate and seemingly insane black slave woman with the authority of representing the history of slavery. Gayatri Spivak asserts that the subaltern cannot speak for themselves because they have no means of representation, which makes it necessary that intelligentsia should speak on behalf of the oppressed people. Dealing with the history of slavery in the neo-slave narratives, African American writers have discovered and represented the silenced voices of the black slaves. However, Jones’s The Known World problematizes such efforts of the black intelligent class to represent the experiences of black slaves in the antebellum South by questioning the authority of language and historiography. Jones’s novel deliberately blurs the boundary between fiction and history by showing how the authority of language is at the hands of people in power. Significantly, in Jones’s novel that has more than 45 characters, it is Alice, an illiterate and seemingly insane slave woman, who is able to represent the history of slavery most accurately through her artistry. In the novel, Alice’s two picture maps on the quilts function not only as the most precise historical record of the plantations in antebellum Virginia but also as the navigation that leads black people to a spiritual awakening of their reality. In this manner, Jones places the ultimate knower of the antebellum Southern history outside the language system that has sustained the white racist discourses and Western historiography.
Abstract
This essay discusses how Edward P. Jones endows an illiterate and seemingly insane black slave woman with the authority of representing the history of slavery. Gayatri Spivak asserts that the subaltern cannot speak for themselves because they have no means of representation, which makes it necessary that intelligentsia should speak on behalf of the oppressed people. Dealing with the history of slavery in the neo-slave narratives, African American writers have discovered and represented the silenced voices of the black slaves. However, Jones’s The Known World problematizes such efforts of the black intelligent class to represent the experiences of black slaves in the antebellum South by questioning the authority of language and historiography. Jones’s novel deliberately blurs the boundary between fiction and history by showing how the authority of language is at the hands of people in power. Significantly, in Jones’s novel that has more than 45 characters, it is Alice, an illiterate and seemingly insane slave woman, who is able to represent the history of slavery most accurately through her artistry. In the novel, Alice’s two picture maps on the quilts function not only as the most precise historical record of the plantations in antebellum Virginia but also as the navigation that leads black people to a spiritual awakening of their reality. In this manner, Jones places the ultimate knower of the antebellum Southern history outside the language system that has sustained the white racist discourses and Western historiography.
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