Earticle

초록

영어

This essay interrogates the dominant discourse of a mixed-race man's sexuality under Jim Crow and its counter-discourse by exploring James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Recent scholarship on the novel presents Johnson's text as a somewhat conservative text in which the protagonist's alleged deviation from normative racial identity and heterosexuality prefigures his tragic fate. Scholars such as Siobhan B. Somerville and Phillip Brian Harper contend that Johnson's portrayal of his mulatto protagonist as a homosexual subject conforms to the logic of dominant white discourse in which homosexual and interracial sexuality are tabooed and stigmatized. Against those critical assessments of Johnson's novel as a male version of the tragic mulatta narrative, my essay argues that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges the cultural politics of racial segregation that racializes and sexualizes a light skinned black male subject. In doing so, I examine Johnson's rhetorical strategy through which, I suggest, his narrative actually troubles the racist fantasy that pathologizes the protagonist's biracial origins and sexuality. Specifically, I explore Johnson's appropriation and strategic deployment of racist stereotypes associated with a mixed-race man, arguing that Johnson's use of racist discourses criticizes rather than reifies the conservative politics that critics generally identify in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

목차

I. Introduction
 II. Johnson on Interracial Sexuality
 III. The Black Man's White Man's Black Man
 IV. Refiguring the Mulatto Body
 Works cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Kangyl Ko [ 고강일 | 연세대학교 ]

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