Earticle

초록

영어

Wallace Thurman, whom Langston Hughes hailed as a “strangely brilliant black boy,” was an unconventional but popular writer during the Harlem Renaissance. This essay interrogates the black-Asian conjunction in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929). More specifically, I examine how Thurman’s novel seemingly elides the interaction within the racial margins in the racially diverse metropolis of New York City in the early twentieth century. In The Blacker the Berry, Thurman introduces a multiracial character, Alva, whose “mother had been an American mulatto [and] father a Filipino.” In essence, Alva’s body becomes a site in which multiple race, ethnicity, and sexuality converge. However, other than imprinting “oriental” features on Alva, Thurman does not directly address his Asianness any further; no one in the novel, not even Alva himself, comments on his Asian heritage. It is interesting to see, nonetheless, how Alva complicates notions of black masculinity for Thurman, which is demonstrated by Thurman’s deployment of Alva as straddling masculinity and effeminacy; Emma Lou Morgan, Thurman’s heroine, locates Alva’s masculine appeal in his Asianness, even as his “Orientality” later becomes a marker of his sexual deviance. Moreover, even as Alva is mostly identified as black throughout the novel, his “oriental” features become prominent when he finds himself in compromising situations and thereby prompt his racial castration. Consequently, it becomes imperative to consider what is at stake for Thurman to obscure a specific part of Alva’s racial/ethnic heritage. In sum, this essay investigates Alva’s body as an apposite site wherein we can grapple with the reciprocity and the blurred boundaries between the binaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

목차

Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Hyeyurn Chung [ 정혜연 | 성신여자대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813