Browsing by Subject "Racism in literature"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    "I'm a long way from home": Seeking Belonging in the Afterlives of Slavery in Octavia Butler's Kindred
    (2019) Viechweg, Seanna; Solomon, Asali
    In her 1978 neo-slave narrative Kindred, Octavia Butler utilizes the science-fiction trope of time travel to allow Dana, a Black woman from the 20th century, to travel to the antebellum South where she both witnesses and experiences trauma inflicted on slaves. While many scholars have recognized and lauded Kindred for its mediation on race and history through science fiction, they have not extensively considered how the text allegorically comments on the realities of African-Americans in a contemporary context. Throughout my project, I apply theoretical frameworks by scholars such as Christina Sharpe, Avery Gordon, bell hooks, and Rahul K. Gairola whose work investigate the consequences of slavery on African-Americans’ ability to forge a sense of safety and home in America. As intergenerational trauma theory has emphasized, slavery raises questions about the experiences of African-Americans whose unjust realities may be connected to the historical violence their ancestors endured. Despite the fact that critics of the novel have examined Dana’s experiences in the past considerably, it is just as crucial to analyze the long-term implications of Dana’s time travel in the present and future beyond the limits of the text itself. Exploring Dana’s struggle with belonging can suggest the implications of slavery in a modern society where African-Americans must grapple with surrounding forms of institutionalized racism such as mass incarceration and police brutality.
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    Prophecies of the Breach: The Whiteness and Blackness of Sea Monsters
    (2014) Kahn, Nicholas A. B.; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    This essay addresses racial monstrosity in the sea-monsters of two important novels from the antebellum United States: the "shrouded human figure" in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1839) and the White Whale in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Whereas scholarship on the racial monstrosity of these monsters has historically read them allegorically as products of the specific conditions of pre-Civil War America, I argue for transcending the allegorical reading. I read the monstrosity of Moby Dick and the "shrouded human figure" rather as rooted in fears and desires that were not abolished with slavery, and are not confined to a historical moment. They blur metaphysical boundaries that are fundamentally human, lying between known and unknown, self and other, white and black. I argue that, given an allegorical reading, Poe's sea-monster embodies a fear of racial revolution that is racist; but becomes a more-destructive metaphysical fear of blackness overtaking whiteness when one moves beyond the allegorical/historical reading. Similarly, for Ahab Moby Dick embodies the fear of blackness usurping whiteness, but Melville offers something that Poe does not: a way of viewing the monster that reconciles whiteness with blackness. Melville's antidote to the monster is linked to the abolitionist mentality that blends black and white America into a new and coherent whole. But, more importantly, his vision of peaceful incorporation (rather than violent division) turns the boundary between white and black from a source of fear into a catalyst for transcendent human communion.
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    Unasked, Unspoken 'Theory in the Flesh' in Danielle Evans' Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
    (2014) Nichols, Dana A.; Reckson, Lindsay Vail, 1982-
    In her short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans makes implicit racism visible to the eye. She relies on character and form to fill in subtext, but most importantly her work demands the reader to understand the coded world in which all of her characters live. Subtlety runs deep in Evans' narration to the point where it taps into the epicenter of what it means to be marginalized right this very moment. Her stories show the ways racism is navigated and resisted. This thesis is my literary exploration of modern day implicit racism in America. Prejudice is still persistently expressed through actions and words even if it is not the premeditated racism of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and lynching. All forms of racism function to render its subjects physically and psychologically incapacitated in the world. Evans elucidates the types of silent violences that her characters are fighting. As overt racism has receded from sight, so too have its obvious indicators. Racism is now deeply internal, psychological, physiological, and spiritual. How can we talk about race in the 21st century? We can't really. We can't talk about racism because it is skillfully concealed in normative language and behavior. My entry point into this literary exploration is fundamentally about the inconvenience of language. In the perpetuation of racism, language is actually quite skillful, but in the attempt to reveal its existence on the receiving end, it is almost impossible.