Palimpsest Skin in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for You Yesterday
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This paper illustrates the importance of John Edgar Wideman’s novel Sent for You Yesterday as a turning point in his career, in that it is in this novel that Wideman integrates Eurocentric traditions with his own personal experience and history as an African American. While this novel deals with his lifelong subjects, such as racial conflicts, tensions between individual and community, the ultimate affirmation of absorption to community, Wideman underscores particularly the persistence and significance of the past in the present. According to him, “to live our lives to the fullest,” we depend on the presence of past lives. To explore these issues, Wideman foregrounds an albino African American character in the novel. Through an albino African American’s white skin layered on a black body, the writer effectively interrogates culturally and historically charged meanings of skin color. Furthermore, the albino character functions as a liminal character who can serve to record and preserve the history of his community Homewood. His doubly-layered skin emblematizes the traces of the past persisting to the present and becomes a living parchment. Through this eminent character, Wideman shows that the unburied past can “open doors towards the future.”
Abstract
This paper illustrates the importance of John Edgar Wideman’s novel Sent for You Yesterday as a turning point in his career, in that it is in this novel that Wideman integrates Eurocentric traditions with his own personal experience and history as an African American. While this novel deals with his lifelong subjects, such as racial conflicts, tensions between individual and community, the ultimate affirmation of absorption to community, Wideman underscores particularly the persistence and significance of the past in the present. According to him, “to live our lives to the fullest,” we depend on the presence of past lives. To explore these issues, Wideman foregrounds an albino African American character in the novel. Through an albino African American’s white skin layered on a black body, the writer effectively interrogates culturally and historically charged meanings of skin color. Furthermore, the albino character functions as a liminal character who can serve to record and preserve the history of his community Homewood. His doubly-layered skin emblematizes the traces of the past persisting to the present and becomes a living parchment. Through this eminent character, Wideman shows that the unburied past can “open doors towards the future.”
참고문헌 (16)
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