Slavery as Metaphor: Charles Johnson’s Crosscultural ‘Slave Narratives’
L’esclavage comme métaphore dans les « récits d’esclaves » de Charles Johnson
p. 135-146
Résumés
L’esclavage comme métaphore dans les « récits d’esclaves » de Charles Johnson.
Charles Johnson a souvent mis en scène l’identité noire, en insistant sur la dynamique structurelle et les pièges psychologiques de l’esclavage. Son approche procède de son intérêt pour la phénoménologie et le boudhisme zen. Dans sa nouvelle, « L’éducation de Mingo », la relation entre maître et esclave devient la métaphore de ce que l’on peut appeler en termes hégéliens, Selbst-Bewusstsein. Cette définition complexe de l’identité personnelle dépassant les catégories artificielles (genre, race, histoire) enrichit le débat sur l’ethnicité et le multiculturalisme
Adding to the upsurge of narratives of and about slavery in contemporary African American writing Charles Johnson repeatedly dramatized the treacherous search for (black) identity by focusing on the structural dynamics and psychological trapdoors of bondage. Contrary to the bulk of these modem slave narratives, however, Johnson’s use of “slavery” predominantly is informed by his interest in Zen, phenomenology and philosophical discourse in general. Thus, in his early short story “The Education of Mingo”, which will be at the center of my discussion here, the innate connectedness of master and slave becomes a metaphor of what-in Hegelian terms – might be called “Selbst-Bewuβtsein”, the complex, cross-generic, cross-cultural formation of personal identity. By undoing the fetters of relative being, i.e. of being exclusively defined by “artificial” markers (like gender, race or history), Johnson has made, I would argue, a positive contribution to the ongoing debate over ethnicity and multiculturalism
Texte intégral
1Among contemporary African-American fiction writers Charles Johnson stands out as one of the most innovative and original voices. His three highly acclaimed novels (the most recent, Middle Passage, won the National Book Award in 1990) as well as his collection of short stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), are all sparkling philosophical narratives that combine zany, spellbinding story-telling with inquiries into questions of being, race and ethnic identity. As an “on-again-off-again Buddhist” and university-trained philosopher Charles Johnson has a theoretical background that ranges from Merleau Ponty’s neophenomenological tenets to Zen, Hinduism and African-American folk wisdom. By articulating the black American experience in terms of a complex and widespread intellectual heritage, a process he calls “cross-cultural fertilization”, his fiction is comparable only to the intricate, also border-crossing texts of the Afro-Cuban-American poet Jay Wright1.
2As he tells us in Being and Race, an anthology of theoretical and historical essays on black writing, Johnson’s literary career originally started with “six bad, apprentice novels, three that aped the style of James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Hohn A. Williams..., and three that were heavily influenced by what a few critics now call the Black Aesthetic"2. Having arrived at the conclusion that both of the then dominant veins of black fiction, radical cultural nationalism as well as social realism and the protest novel, fall short of defining the African-American experience, he put aside all of his manuscripts and – in 1974 – set out to write a genuine black philosophical romance, Faith and the Good Thing. Centered in phenomenology, Buddhism and African American folklore Johnson’s first published novel established a narrative pattern which he will develop and elaborate on throughout his fictional work: the treacherous search for (black) identity3. As even a cursory look at his novels and short stories may attest, undoing the ideological encrustations of race and history is a pervasive concern of Charles Johnson’s fiction. Since all of his protagonists ultimately reject the aporia of “relative being”, i.e. of being exclusively defined by their blackness, they often appear to be “invisible men” turned Buddhists4. Both in his fiction and elsewhere Johnson relentlessly directs our attention to the trapdoors of forced collectivism, of black self-assertion via stifling metonymical strategies (like the pars-pro-toto syndrome typical of most ostracised groups) or the sort of racial stereotyping that marks, for instance, cultural nationalism from Marcus Garvey to Ron Karenga. In accordance with this stance Johnson stubbornly repudiated his public cooption as the intellectual spokesman of black America, a notion that struck him as equally presumptuous and – in view of the different cultural, social and geographical background of African Americans – untenable5.
3Adding to the upsurge of narratives of slavery in recent African American fiction-culminating around the mid-eighties in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) – Johnson’s most poignant discussions of race and personal identity are all situated within the context of slavery and slave culture(6). Yet, in taking the structural dynamics of bondage as a point of departure for philosophical speculation, as a metaphor of the condition humaine, his texts essentially differ from the bulk of contemporary narratives of and about slavery. This becomes quite clear when we look at Johnson’s second novel, Oxherding Tale (1982), and-as of today-his veritable “masterpiece”. By signifying on the inherent limitations and paradoxes of the slave narrative, a fountainhead for African-American writing ever since its beginnings, Johnson explores the mutual dependencies of self-authentication and autobiographical form. Far from ridiculing the adoption of autobiography as an important mode of black self-expression Oxherding Tale is extremely effective in deconstructing the Western notion of the self as a given, prefabricated entity, a primordial essence that could be regained through a textual movement from uniformity to originality, from nonbeing to being. Whereas the autobiographical pattern presupposes a personal voice increasingly gathering contour and momentum, Johnson’s postmodern slave narrative hails the “manumission of first-person viewpoint”. At the end of the novel, as the author takes pains to explain, we are listening to a narrating self “who is less a reporter than an opening through which the world is delivered: first-person (if you wish) universal7”. Following the non-linear structure of the ten Oxherding Pictures, a cycle of Zen drawings used for the instruction of novices, the text thus enacts the painful search for an identity outside the vicious categories of individuality, history, and race8. From the vantage point of philosophic universalism, so Johnson’s message, generic markers like race or ethnicity are but the resuit of a dangerous perceptual fallacy, a wrong way, as he borrows from Merleau-Ponty, “of singing the world” (Being: 123).
4“No form [...] loses its ancestry”, we are told in one of the several theoretical excursions in the text, “rather [its] meaning accumulate in layers of tissue as the form evolves”. (Oxherding”: 119). In regard to black writing and its use of such ancestral modes as the slave narrative, Oxherding Tale accordingly calls for a sort of Creative re-appropriation, an archaeological method, that will lay bare the full range of its accumulated meaning(s): the influence of that “hoary confession by the first philosophical black writer: Saint Augustine”, the Puritan Narrative, the nineteenth-century picaresque novel, the story of manners and numerous others. “All a modem writer need to”, Johnson tells us, “is dig, dig, dig – call it spadework – until the form surrenders its diverse secrets” (119). By pointing to the historicity and interrelatedness of different modes of literary expression Johnson makes a plea for what he described elsewhere as playful “phenomenological variations”. In Being and Race he expounded at length the phenomenological, universalist background of his position: “If we go deeply enough into a relative perspective, black or white, male or female, we encounter the transcendance of relativism; [...] because what we have, from the standpoint of phenomenology, are not different worlds but instead innumerable perspectives on one world; and we know that, when it cornes to the crunch, we share, all of us, the same cultural Lifeworld – a world layered with ancestors, predecessors, and contemporaries” (44). From this perspective his intricate, multi-layered narratives become but an instrument of philosophical speculation, a means for phenomenological “spadework”. Notwithstanding their explicit universalist aspirations, however, most of Johnson’s texts remain embedded in an African-American context. As his scattered allusions to trickster figures like Brer Rabbit or High John de Conqueror suggest, Johnson coopts the linguistic trickery (or signifying) of black story telling as a sort of grass roots phenomenology. What he calls spadework, then, actually is a re-appropriation of an already established rhetorical strategy which is marked according to Henry Louis Gates, by “the play of the tradition, the play on the tradition, the sheer play of indeterminacy itself”9.
5In a famous essay James Baldwin had once declared that “what connects a slave to his master is more tragic than what separates them”10. This verdict, though perhaps with a less fatal, devastating connotation, could function perfectly as an epigraph to “The Education of Mingo”, the parabolical opening story of Johnson’s so far only collection of short fiction, The Sorceror’s Apprentice11. Although written in the witty, prosaic register of slave and plantation stories the text simultaneously points to the Western tradition of natural philosophy and cultural critique, a discourse ranging front Plato, Aquinus and Montaigne to Rousseau, Voltaire and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Like elsewhere in his work Johnson again brilliantly succeeds in joining his theoretical interests with an extremely funny, captivating narrative style. Though one of the most laugh-provoking stories assembled here, “The Education of Mingo” is certainly also the most metaphorical, complex, and – by implication– politically far-reaching. Together with its principal actors we are “hurtling headlong into a rigid New Testament parable”, a philosophical “Gleich-nis”, focusing not so much on the differences but on the similarities, the fatal historical relatedness of slave and master, of black and white America.
6Feeling badly the need for company Moses Green, a good-natured, “monkeylike” farmer without children or kinfolk, sets out to get himself “a field hand and helpmate-a friend, to speak the truth plainly” (4). On the next auction day possible he purchases a bondsman called Mingo who, according to the auctioneer, is a member of the Allmuseri, a legendary tribe of wizards and sorcerers. Unable to communicate with the freshly imported African, Moses is struck with the idea to teach him not only the rudiments of the English language but “everything” he knows: trade, mores, and – above all – “common sense”. Since he dimly understands that the success of washing “a Moor white in a single generation” primarily depends on the establishment of a model, a good example to be followed and emulated, Moses begins to constantly “revise” himself. For Mingo, on the other hand, the educational venture of the simple-minded farmer involves, as we are told by the narrative voice, “the evaporation of one coherent, consistent, complete universe and embracing of another one alien, contradictory, strange”. This idea of a perfectly transformed, white-washed Negro becomes a contested issue between Moses and his “lady friend” Harriet Bridgewater. As a Southern conservative and pragmatic – for her a slave is nothing but “a tool with life in it” –, an eternal outsider from a faraway continent who will never be able to share her perceptual and ethical categories. Rejecting the possibility of a Negro ever being exorcised from his blackness, she repeatedly warns against the outcome of Moses’ experiment: “You know everything here’s strange to him. [...] And it’ll always be a little strange-like seeing the world through a fun house mirror” (9).
7In the meantime Mingo proves to be a quick and zealous learner. As a matter of fact, he adopts the idiosyncracies and mental attitudes of his master so well that – within a single year – he grows into a Virtual reflection of the latter, a mirror image, a mere appendix of his model. As Moses smugly affirms: “the African [...] was exactly the product of his own way of seeing, as much one of his products and judgements as his choice of tobacco (7). Yet, the incredible uniformity between the two eventually becomes a startling experience for the old man. With a clear sense of foreboding Moses knows no more how to corne to terms with his disciple: is he, after all, a homunculus, a strange and deformed being but yet a “being”, a living thing that retains a stamina and momentum of its own; or, rather, is he a distorted shadow of his master, the very extension of his soul, the super-ego of his own miserable self? While still pondering over his relationship to the young Allmuseri, however, Moses is confronted with the deathly consequences of his “education sentimentale”: Mingo turned monster. Apparently misinterpreting one of his master’s lessons in the manners of the New World, the boy slaughters, first a neighbor and friend, and secondly Harriet Bridgewater, by then Moses’ would-be fiancée. Left with the alternative of either killing or freeing his murderous counterpart, the ill-fated slaveholder cornes to realize that he is caught in a double-bind of his own making: "killing the boy somehow wouldn’t put things to rights; it would be like they were killing Moses himself, destroying a part of his soul [...]. Then manumit the African? Noble gesture, that. But how in blazes could he disengage himself when Mingo shored up, sustained, let be Moses’ world with all its sores and blemishes every time he opened his oily black eyes?” (18/19). Yielding himself up to the inescapable, i.e. the eternal relatedness of master and slave, Moses mounts his rig and – with Mingo at his side – heads for some unknown place in the west.
8As the above summary of the story immediately suggests nothing in this text is to be taken at face value. Form, plot, setting, names-all seem to be extremely symbolical or, to borrow a term from linguistic discourse, semantically “overdetermined”. Let us begin with the form itself. In his essay on “Being and Form” Johnson explicitly points to “The Education of Mingo” as a story that has been conceived in the tradition of the biblical Parable:
In either its comic or its tragic variations, the Parable invokes a universe considerably more mysterious than that of the Fable. Underpinning its world are esoteric and moral laws often unknown to the protagonist, who must act nevertheless and, in ignorance of the way things work beneath the level of mere appearances, finds his actions turn out wrong or prove themselves too ambiguous for reason, so limited, to fully grasp, as in my story “The Education of Mingo” (Being: 49).
9This evaluation of the strategies of parabolic narrative is to be found amid a more extensive scrutiny of literary forms and their respective pedigrees. Referring to John Gardner’s The Forms of Fiction and Northrop Frye’s classical The Educated Imagination, Johnson maintains that the modem novel or short story may assume any of the plethora of previous narrative forms, be they diaries, slave narratives, hymns, sermons, or even interlocking business documents. According to his phenomenological perspective nothing gets lost, every literary form, however original or innovative it may appear to us, bristles with the history of its predecessors, reverberates with the meanings of its various textual roots. “No form”, as we already know from Oxherding Tale, “loses its ancestry”.
10The philosophical implications of these tenets are far-reaching and instrumental for an understanding of Johnson’s phenomenological poetics. If we assume that literary form always points toward its pedigree, its diverse ancestors, no writer of fiction could be credited with having created a text solely out of his own imagination. Every work of art is related to every other work of art, no matter if the other precedes or even follows its actual “creation”. Given the historicity and universal connectedness of all forms of literary expression artistic innovation becomes an act of conscious re-appropriation, a process of ongoing excavation and rewriting or, in Johnson’s own term, of textual spadework. And as for the artist himself, he, too, is inescapably chained to his predecessors and forefathers. As Johnson explains, “he cannot begin ex nihilo. He must have models with which to agree, partly agree or outright oppose, and these can corne only from the tradition of literature itself” (Being: 5). How do these theoretical reflections relate to the story at hand? If we read carefully we can see that Moses is satirized as a godlike figure, as the artist who assumes to have created out of the void, as the father and originator of a new and refined object: “He felt, late at night when he looked down at Mingo snoring loudly on his corn-shuck mattress, now like a father, now like an artist fingering something fine and noble from a rude chump of foreign clay” (Mingo: 5). And like any artist would do he wanted the boy to be wholly “his own emanation”, yet, simultaneously, different enough from his creator “so that he could step back and admire him” (11). Caught by the narcissistic, patriarchal desire to duplicate his own image Moses complacently forgets about the other, the “darker” side of his progeny. In as far as it relates to writing and literary form Mingo’s momentous misreading of his master could well be taken as a metaphor of the repressed other, the formal and cultural pedigree of the text (here: the African’s own cultural background), turning against the author12. Thus, by way of foregrounding the numerous predecessors that be, the biblical Parable, Platonic dialogue, the gothic novel or even the African American trickster tale, Johnson tacitly directs our attention to the intertextuality and relatedness of all literary discourses.
11This, however, is only one of the multiple layers and subtexts of the story. In a broader historical perspective the parable also refers to the trapdoors and shortcomings of philosophical rationalism or, to be more precise, its notorious anthropological offspring: the noble savage theme. By the end of the eighteenth century Western anthropology had constructed a utopian racial other, the primordial native untainted by the evil influence of civilization, in order to bring about its enlightened ideas of human nature. “This fetishization of the Wild Man”, as Hayden White put it, “was inevitable because, first of all, the concept of a specifically human nature is only negatively definable. Man is what the animal and the divine are not”13. As the forebear of subsequent forms of idealistic racial stereotyping this dangerously naive and utopian portrayal of blackness can be traced in many of the discourses on race and race relations up to this very day14. Yet, the concomitant belief in the innate passivity and submissiveness of the African, one of the most virulent myths in the wake of the noble savage theme, also had its critics. From Melville’s philosophical novella Benito Cereno (1855) to Joseph Conrad’s probings into The Heart of Darkness (1890), from Richard Wright’s shocking revelation of a black American’s psyche in Native Son (1940) to the Cassandra cries of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1962) there were plenty of voices – on both sides of the color line – that warned against an oversimplified, myth-laden attitude toward Africans and African Americans. It is in the vein of this critique that Johnson tries to expose the philosophical underpinnings of the noble savage theme, a cultural myth thriving on politics of exclusion and otherness.
12For Moses who knew well that “everything about him and the African was as different as night and day” the untamed Allmuseri likewise signified the means “to make sense of things”, to corne to terms with a world too complex and elusive for him to grasp: “It was like aiming a shotgun at the whole world through the African”, we are told by the narrator, “blasting away all that Moses, according to his lights, tagged evil, and cultivating the good; like standing, you might say, on the sixth day, feet planted wide, trousers hitched, and remaking the world so it looked more familar” (5-6). To recreate the African in the white man’s image, as we already know, proved to be a disastrous and utterly destructive task. Misreading his master’s speech the slave – once left to himself – murders in cold blood a neighbor and friend: “Months ago, maybe five, he’s taught Mingo to kill chicken hawks and be courteous to strangers, but it got all turned around in the African’s mind (how was he to know New World customs?), so he was courteous to chicken hawks (Moses groaned, full of gloom) and killed strangers” (13-14). Contrary to what Moses initially presumes, this fatal misunderstanding is effected not so much by their different cultural encodings but by the African’s ability to read his mind, to interpret him literally. As a perfect double of his master Mingo also had access to his hidden thoughts and desires. Hence he knew well that Moses repeatedly had wished his neighbor to hell and that his feelings toward Harriet Bridgewater were in fact, to say the least, ambivalent. Given his status as a mirror image, a pure reflection of his master’s mind, the African then could hardly be held responsible. Everything he did, as the farmer grudgingly admits, Mingo had done by proxy. “Mingo, you more me than I am myself. [...] All the wrong, all the good you do, now or tomorrow – it’s me indirectly doing it, but without the lies and excuses, without the feeling what’s its foundation, with all the polite make-up and apologies removed. It’s an empty gesture, like the swing of a shadow’s arm. You can’t never see things exactly the way I do. I’m guilty. It was me set the gears in motion” (22).
13In the end, both of the principal actors, master and slave, teacher and disciple, have become bound up in a skein of “eternal relatedness”. Shackled together by a failed educational project theirs is a relationship of give and take, of mutual dependency and indebtedness. The gist of the story, then, hinges on what Johnson calls “universal connectedness”, the belief that at bottom everything is related to everything else and that the notion of an autonomous, independent self is nothing but a timeworn delusion of Cartesian philosophy. If it were not for its specific setting, the nightmare of slavery and – by implication – its deathly consequences for African Americans and American society at large, the parable could easily be mistaken for a dazzling but purely theoretical exercise in philosophical speculation, a dramatized, black version – so to speak – of Hegel’s master-and-slave episode. But there also is a more immediate and politically consequential reading. Like the “white Negro” in Oxherding Tale or the slave ship – ominously called Republic – that is at the center of Johnson’s prizewinning novel Middle Passage, the doomed couple, one black, one white, heading for some unknown place in the west clearly serves allegorical functions. If we go by the words of the white protagonist the African brought forth “all the wrong, all the good [of his master’s character] but without the lies and excuses”. Having been forced to continuously read his master’s mind, the slave thus turned into a sort of cultural superego, a relentless critic and deconstructor of white society. Blacks, as Henry Louis Gates sarcastically remarked, “commenced [their] cultural life in this hemisphere as veritable deconstructions [...] of all that Western culture so ardently wished itself to be”15. This is to say, however, that their communicative structure, to borrow a term from the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is essentially dialogical, i.e. capable of expansion and interpretation. For Bakhtin the self cannot be understood or expressed except in relation to an audience, to a counterpart whose real or imagined responses continually shape the way in which we define our identity. From this perspective, at least, it seems that what connects a slave to his master, is much less tragic after all than what separates them. With the recent turbulences and aberrations of multiculturalism in view, Johnson’s philosophical parable can rightfully claim to have touched upon the topic and needs of the day.
Notes de bas de page
1 Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1948, Charles Richard Johnson went to college at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he majored in journalism and philosophy. After having completed his M.A. in 1973, he came under the auspices of John Gardner who, at that time, was teaching Creative writing at Southern Illinois University. While simultaneously trying his hand as a cartoonist, photojournalist and fiction writer, Johnson married his former classmate Joan New and enrolled in the Ph. D. program at SUNY-Stony Brook, concentrating on phenomenology and literary aesthetics. Today, he holds an endowed chair in humanities at the University of Washington whose Creative Writing Program he headed for almost 15 years. In addition to his literary work Charles Johnson has published two books of drawings, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972), and a collection of critical essays Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988). He has written scripts for numerous television series, including the prize-winning PBS drama "Booker”, and is a permanent reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and a Consulting editor for The Seattle Review.
2 Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988): 5. All further quotations from this edition.
3 As Johnson points out this, of course, has also been the major topic of African American fiction in general: “The black American writer begins his or her career with-and continues to exhibit-a crisis of identity. If anything, black fiction is about the troubled quest for identity and liberty, the agony of social alienation, the longing for a real and at tintes a mythical home” (Being: 8).
4 It certainly was not by coincidence alone that Charles Johnson, after almost 40 years, was the first black writer since Ralph Ellison to be honored with the prestigious National Book Award.
5 Thus, in an interview with The Washington Post, he maintained: “I find it very difficult to swallow the idea that one individual, black or white, can speak for the experience of 30 million people. Some of whom, you know, their great-granddaddy was a slave, but some of whom, their familles have been free since the Revolutionary War. Some are from the South. Some are from the North. We have black millionaires, and we have black people whose families have been on welfare for three generations. We have Africans. We have West Indians... So the idea of being a spokesman is something I find repulsive. Would anyone ask John Updike to be a spokesman for white America?”. In Marjorie Williams, “The Author’s Solo Passage: Charles Johnson on Race and Writing", The Washington Post, Tuesday, December 4 (1990): D8.
6 According to Ashraf H. Rushdy four basic types of the contemporary narrative of slavery are discernible. First, there are narratives “which either set their action in the slave communities of the antebellum South or represent in third-person narration the memory of a former slave reliving the time of slavery; among these Rushdy categorizes Johnson’s short stories “The Education of Mingo” and "The Sorceror’s Apprentice”. Secondly, we have narratives “which set their action in contemporary, late-twentieth-century America, but which deal [...] with the lives and psychological make up of modem men and women whose ancestors were enslaved”. A third type includes the narrative of genealogy representing the slave experience in terms of tracing the history of a family-often through the turmoils of slavery-back to its roots. And finally, there are texts that imitate, more or less explicitly, the forms and conventions of the slave narrative itself; here we can find Johnson’s two latest novels Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage. Although I wouldn’t contest the usefulness of Rushdy’s typology I think its limits become quite evident when applied to such antagonistic texts as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Johnson’s “The Education of Mingo” which-following Rushdy-would represent the sanie type of narrative. See Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, “The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery”, African American Review, Volume 26, No. 3 (1992): 375.
7 Oxherding Tale (New York: Grove Press, 1984; orig. 1982) : 153. All quotations from this edition.
8 For the use of Eastern philosophy in Oxherding Tale see William Gleason, “The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale”, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 25, No. 4 (Winter 1991).
9 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Blackness of Blackness: a Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey”, in Black Literature and Literary Theory, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed. (New York : Methuen, 1984) : 305. This coinage (spadework) is in itself a wonderful example of black figuration and black speech. According to Clarence Major “spade” actually is a (black) reappropriation of a racist slur; as a positive form of self-description it has become a widespread signifier for “a Negro” during the 1940s and 50s. See Clarence Major, ed. Black Slang: A dictionary of Afro-American Talk (London: Routledge, 1971).
10 No Name in the Street (New York: Dial, 1972): 87.
11 “The Education of Mingo” was first published in Mother Jones, 2 (August 1977), p. 49-53. The Sorceror’s Apprentice (New York : London : Serpent’s, 1988, orig. 1986). All quotations from this edition.
12 Since it is essentially a tale about the trapdoors of creation, i.e. the violent draining and re-inscription of the African, “The Education of Mingo”, in many ways, could be read as a modem (black) version of Shelley’s Frankenstein. That the author might have had a similar reading in mind is indicated by the fact that Harriet Bridgewater, while discussing the dangers of Moses’ educational endeavor, had on her lap “a volume by one M. Shelley, a recent tale of monstrosity and existential horror” (17).
13 “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish”, in Tropics oj Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982): 186.
14 New Negro, for example, a term which dominated the racial discourse of African Americans from the end of the century to the Harlem Renaissance, was a rhetorical figure in the vein of such pseudo-utopian stereotypes like the Noble Savage. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. pointed out, “just as utopia signifies ‘noplace’, so does ‘New Negro’ signify 'a black person who lives at no place’, and at no time. It is a bold and audacious act of language, signifying the will to power, to dare to recreate a race by renaming it, despite the dubiousness of the venture”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black”, in The New American Studies, Philip Fisher, ed. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1991) : 322. See also Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).
15 “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black”, p. 312.
Auteur
-
Klaus Benesch
Univ. de Munic
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
La Beauté et ses monstres
Dans l’Europe baroque (16e-18e siècles)
Gisèle Venet, Tony Gheeraert et Line Cottegnies (dir.)
2003
Le Lierre et la chauve-souris
Réveils gothiques. Émergence du roman noir anglais (1764-1824)
Élizabeth Durot-Boucé
2004
Médecins et médecine dans l’œuvre romanesque de Tobias Smollett et de Laurence Sterne
1748-1771
Jacqueline Estenne
1995
