Browsing by Subject "Race in literature"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    An Exploration of Racial Identity and Performance in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
    (2017) Bowles, Jamauri; Solomon, Asali
    The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published at the start of the 20th century, and the story’s setting is the post-Reconstruction era in the United States. The novel focuses on racial identity, but it also prominently features the theme of performance. This paper will investigate how performance creates a disruption in how the main character of the book looks at his racial identity, and how he attempts to re-establish his understanding of it and the comfort that it affords him, to no avail. It will also look at how the main character’s life experiences illuminate ideas of double-consciousness and passing. In this paper, the presence of performance in the novel will be explored through the main character’s relationships with his parents, his interactions with music, and locations and travels to different cities. By the conclusion of this paper, it will be seen that performance illustrates both subtle and obvious ways to see how blackness is marginalized in society, and that the main character’s feelings of alienation and isolation, which arise from his struggle with his racial identity, indicate a perceived inferiority of blackness to whiteness in America.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Bodies Under Construction: Architectures of Pleasure and Whiteness in Chesnutt's "Po Sandy"
    (2015) Jones, Sydney; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    In this work, I examine the intersections of race, architecture, and consumption in “Po Sandy,” a late nineteenth-century work by Charles Chesnutt. Whiteness, in Chesnutt’s conception, emerges through violent performances of its own “naturalized” coherence, often in seemingly innocuous ways. In fact, Chesnutt reveals that even quotidian relationships between bodies and built space embed these types of racialized consolidations. Drawing on critics who have uncovered the white desire to consume an “other” in an effort to secure a racial position, I examine how this exploitative appetite radiates beyond the literal body into the spaces it occupies, which themselves take on corporeal logics. Thus, in Chesnutt, buildings are figured as variously “desirable” or “pleasurable” based on the white racial work they perform—the extent to which they provide a fetishized version of “blackness” as constitutive material for the white self. But Chesnutt, I argue, does more than simply outline the violent construction of whiteness; he also points to the places where the breached black body refuses to be architecturally consumed, where haunting and “sticking” in space disrupt the white form’s appropriative engagement with structures. Ultimately, Chesnutt’s work lends insight into the deeply pernicious attempts to construct whiteness in and through the built landscape and imagines radical, alternative ways of interacting with architectural spaces.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    How do I know you?: Identity Problems and Failure of Racial Binary in Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
    (2011) Shu, Ling; Stadler, Gustavus
    This thesis explores Poe's representations and understandings of race in Pym. After grounding the reader in racial understanding of Poe's time (1830's), the thesis explores binary theory in the context of race, where the key racial matrix is white versus non-white. Based on the understanding that binary pairs are negatively defined and thus structurally unstable and fluid, we can see evidence of racial trait blurring and identity bleeding in Pym. Racial identity determination is based upon both a physical (body) criterion and a performative criterion. We can see tension and contractions where the text struggles to uphold a racial binary but, to an extent, fails. These tensions and contradictions grow increasingly frequent as the narrative progresses. Identity is fluid and cannibalistic in nature. In a limited way, this thesis also addresses colonialism.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar": Multiplicity, Melancholy, and (Mis)Recognition in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer
    (2019) Le, Tina; McGrane, Laura
    Asian Americanness is often described using language that marks this racial categorization’s hybridity and liminality -- the way that they are white, but not white enough and yet the way that they don’t cleanly fit into the category of “colored” either. Drawing from the often overlooked, historically tense racial tensions of Asian immigrants in America, I explore the consequences of America’s unspoken yet violent history towards Asian American (immigrants) through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s racially mixed (Vietnamese/European), hybrid spy protagonist/narrator. Unable to come to terms with the physically, biologically, and ideologically in-betweenness of himself, the narrator struggles to come to terms with his inability to belong, which consequently leads to a failure to adequately construct a narrative/story for himself. I argue that the narrator’s eruptions of violence and his inability to acknowledge these eruptions are a result of his inability to mourn -- and get over -- parts of himself that are excess, that prevent him from belonging, similar to the ways that America as a nation fails to acknowledge and thus “mourn” the violence and harm that it has done onto others. The novel’s confessional form allows the narrator to “write himself” in a way that enables him to confront this melancholy. I read the novel’s eventual break from the confession and the adoption of a less structured liminal form as a mode of mourning, acceptance, and reconstruction for the hybrid narrator.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    “Something Warmly, Infuriatingly Feminine”: Racial (Un)Gendering in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
    (2013) Zola, Alana; Zwarg, Christina, 1949-
    Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, has often been accused of exclusively employing simplistic stereotypes in depicting its female characters; yet upon closer examination, Ellison’s female characters are not only complex but also deeply meaningful to the novel’s messages regarding race and gender identity in America. Together, Hortense Spillers, Judith Butler, and Eric Lott provide the key theoretical framework for examining the dynamic intersections of race and gender in Ellison’s novel. Spiller’s notion of the “ungendered” black woman is particularly critical for understanding the relationship between black and white femininity. All of these theorists share an approach based in history, which fits naturally with Ellison’s own use of the past as an important tool in his novel. The magnificent blonde, Mr. Norton’s daughter, Matty Lou, Mary Rambo, and Sybil stand as five of the novel’s most significant female characters and, when read together, they illustrate the journey that the Invisible Man himself undergoes in his understanding of race and gender. This selection of female characters provides a diverse array of seemingly stereotypical images that are ultimately complicated by their relationship to the protagonist. The last character, Sybil, is instrumental in the Invisible Man’s critical decision to go into “hibernation” at the end of the novel. Yet Ellison’s Invisible Man nevertheless leaves the reader with an optimistic hope for a better understanding of gender and race in the future.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item