Mimetic Desire and the Complication of the Conventional Neo-Slave Narrative Form in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Ignatius Chukwumah
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
Racial Slavery

AbstractWhen critics declare that Edward P. Jones’s The Known World represents moral turpitude, capitalist proclivities, slavery, and whittling of white supremacy, their assertions are in order. But they often miss accounting for how The Known World, which bears some indices of the neo-slave narrative owing to its appropriation of the incidents of slavery in a novelistic platform, complicates its sub-tradition. This work investigates the text’s two-fold complication. First, Jones complicates the neo-slave narrative form by depicting slavery from a little known perspective of intra-racial slavery amongst black people. Then, he casts a white character, and not a black one, in the mold of a classical tragic hero. Mimetic desire, René Girard’s concept for an individual’s imitation of a prior model’s behavior, is drawn on to bare characters’ actions that accentuate both strands of complication. As the basis of all human action that includes rivalry, violence, and scapegoating, mimetic desire unravels the ‘mystery’ surrounding the sort of slavery overwhelmingly acknowledged by critics as untraditional in The Known World and the tragedy, also unique to the neo-slave narrative form, it gives rise to.

Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Use of the Slave Narrative Form

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
White House ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Racial Slavery

Advancing a formal reading of Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), this chapter shows how Elizabeth Keckly undermines the ideological presumptions that link blackness with enslavement and whiteness with literacy and truth by inverting the racial protocols underlying slave narratives’ conventions of authentication. In Behind the Scenes it is Keckly’s letters that authenticate Mary Lincoln’s version of events, Tad Lincoln’s reading lesson which is included in place of her own, and the narrative gaze is primarily on the white bodies within the text as they take shape in her vocation, dress-making. In overturning these race rituals, which rely on fixed notions of “black” and “white,” Keckly challenges the racial protocols of the slave narrative and exposes how the form itself has been organized by the visual logic of racial slavery.

The Black Lives Matter movement: A call to action: Acts 10:11–16, 25–28, 34–35

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Alfred Smith
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Black Christians ◽  
American Society ◽  
Justice Movements

The Black Lives Matter movement is one of the most dynamic social justice movements currently emerging in the USA. This movement led by young Blacks unapologetically calls out the shameful, historical legacy of American racism and White supremacy while asserting the humanity and sacredness of Black lives, particularly those of unarmed persons senselessly murdered by police officers. While Black Lives Matter is a new movement, it is also an extension of the 400-year struggle of Black people in America to affirm Black dignity, equality, and human rights, even while the major institutions of American society have propagated doctrines and enforced unjust rules/laws to denigrate Black life. Black Christians have found hope and inspiration from the Gospel to claim their humanity and to struggle to gain justice for Black lives and for the lives of all oppressed people. In addition, the Black Lives Matter movement provides a helpful critique of many Black churches, challenging them to confront their biases, which label young Black males as “thugs” (the new N-word) and which cruelly demonize the LGBTQ community. The story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10 provides a scriptural basis for Christian introspection and responses to God’s vision for beloved community, and for the call to action from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Niambi Michele Carter
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Body Politic

Using a personal anecdote to set the stage, the author introduces the fundamental argument of the book, which is that black people respond to the “threat” of immigration by critiquing a system of white supremacy that excludes blacks through the exploitation of other groups. In particular the book examines the ways in which blacks use immigration as a lens to evaluate their own status as citizens. In other words, as blacks think about what immigration means for the nation, they are also thinking about what it means for their group. The context within which they look at immigration is through their own group’s racial experience, which has often found blacks struggling for belonging in the American body politic because of white supremacy.

Measuring Whiteness: A Systematic Review of Instruments and Call to Action

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 530-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Schooley ◽  
Debbiesiu L. Lee ◽  
Lisa B. Spanierman
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Modern Racism

The psychological study of Whiteness provides one avenue for researchers to help combat racial injustice in the United States. This article is a call to action for counseling psychologists to engage in much needed scholarship and critical examinations of Whiteness. In this systematic review and content analysis, we provide an overview of 18 quantitative measures focusing on various aspects of Whiteness published between 1967 and 2017. We summarize the constructs and psychometric properties of these measures. Our content analysis indicated that constructs assessed by Whiteness measures have shifted in focus over time across four themes: (a) Attitudes Toward Black People/Integration, (b) Modern Racism, (c) White Racial Identity, and (d) White Privilege and Antiracism. We conclude with suggestions on how advancement, development, and use of Whiteness measures could further our knowledge through research examining present-day racial justice issues. The issues highlighted include police brutality, xenophobia, immigration, White supremacy, activism, and training in the field.

From slavery and colonialism to Black Lives Matter: new mood music or more fundamental change?

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelarine Cornelius
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Usa

Purpose2020 has proved to be a challenging year. In addition to the challenges of COVID-19, yet again, the USA has witnessed police brutality leading to the death of a Black man, George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, founded in the US but now an international organisation which challenges white supremacy and deliberates harm against Black people, mobilised hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets across the globe. Increasingly, the protests focus not only on George Floyd's murder but also the continued failure to challenge the celebrity of those involved in the transatlantic slave trade and European imperialism. In this article, the author will contend that many organisations are now reexamining their association with these historical wrongs against Black Africa and its diaspora. Further, the author will contend but that the failure to highlight the role of Black chattel slavery and imperialism in the accumulation of economic, commercial and political benefits reaped by the global north is a source of shame not only for many firms and institutions but also for universities.Design/methodology/approachThe author has reviewed the online media for the latest developments in response to Black Lives Matter's George Floyd campaign in 2020 and reviewed the literature on the link between European global ambition and its impact on the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa.FindingsInternationally, there is a discernible change in outlook towards the importance of the evils of slavery and colonialism on the Black experience today. These small steps will require scholars to embark on a fresh reexamination of race, society and work.Originality/valueFor decades, the slave trade and colonialism were issues rarely raised in government, firms and business schools. This will inevitably change especially in those countries that are the main beneficiaries of Black chattel slavery and colonial exploitation. Much Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practice is fundamentally tokenism. A root and branch reappraisal will be needed to create more effective EDI policy and practice in support of race equality and anti-racism.

scholarly journals Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Franco Barchiesi ◽  
Shona N. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Status ◽  
Racial Slavery

Labor historiography in the contexts of modern racial slavery and emancipation has long placed changes in the status of work at the core of the very meaning of captivity and freedom, their epochal watersheds, and institutionalized or unintended overlaps. Reviewing, in this journal's pages, recent scholarship on the relations between slavery and capitalism, James Oakes summarized that the “crucial differences between the political economy of slave and free labor … ultimately led to a catastrophic Civil War and one of the most violent emancipations in the hemisphere.” The literature Oakes critically discussed exemplifies the growing academic interest in the multifarious functionality of coerced production for the development of global capitalism. The resulting picture reaches much further than mere questions of economic causality, or whether chattel slavery did kick-start the profitability of capitalism, rather than the other way around. At stake are explanations of how racial captivity—which liberal economic, political, and moral discourse deems an anachronism—shapes the very productive, financial, social, institutional, and philosophical foundations of the global present. Historic and contemporary activist resistance to recurring and ubiquitous waves of antiblack violence, as well as the increasingly self-confident affirmation of white supremacy across Western states and civil societies has rendered such dilemmas in starker terms, asking whether persistent echoes of racial slavery are symptoms that the system is “built this way” rather than being just “broken.”

De/Constructing White Supremacy: Contending Antipodal Politics in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe ◽  
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African American Youth ◽  
Racial Stratification ◽  
Native Son ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Inferiority Complex ◽  
American Society ◽  
White Hegemony ◽  
Collective Psyche

Arguably, fear, anger and despair dominate the poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas’s daily existence in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Nevertheless, old lies of white supremacy that have held black people in perpetual turmoil are crushed through violent reaction when Bigger strikes at white hegemony through the killing of Mary Dalton. This backlash throws the white community into panic mode. Apparently, African Americans’ increased susceptibility to the inferiority complex of the 1930s was dictated by the dubious racial stratification that allotted a place of superiority to the white race over the black race, which was considered inferior. This misconception was supported by Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races ([1853] 1915) and Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1926). Bigger’s humanity, like that of other African-American youth of this period, is overwhelmed by the racial prejudices of the supremacist whites which demand that they must be meek, submissive and self-debased. As summed up at the trial of Bigger, American society gives black people no options in life and essentially denies them the basic rights of all humans to fulfil their destiny in relationship to the measure of their intelligence and talents. These denials have led to anger, shame and fear which have snowballed into crime and murder. We may, without difficulty, agree that Wright’s portrayal of the killing of Mary is not in any way designed to make Bigger a hero of the black protest against racial marginality. Rather, Bigger is created to accentuate the effects of suffocating social conditions that could turn an individual into an American “native son” raised in an atmosphere of transcendental hopelessness and weaned on the diet of violence, hatred and viciousness which provided the immediate platform for the launching of a backlash against American racism. Using the foregoing as its standpoint, this article examines white/black antipodes and race tensions in Richard Wright’s Native Son. It employs the Freudian conceptual construct of the human psyche, divided into the id, ego and superego, as a theoretical framework. A parallel of the hypothesis is conceived to expound the white/black taxonomy in race discourse. In Freudian psychology, the id is irrational and it projects pleasure principles. The ego is, however, rational and mature, while the superego mediates between the id and the ego. These paradigms are used to explore the collective psyche of race theorists in the paper. 

Black Life, Trans Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-171
Author(s):  
SA Smythe
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The West ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Vulnerable People ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
Black Life

Abstract This essay thinks through some possibilities and implications for a trans studies formation in Europe and across the West that takes as some of its core concerns and ethical commitments black people, black life, and black capacities for insurgency, experimentation, and trans nonbinary method. Writing against the logics of displacement, disciplinarity, and depletion, what follows is a brief meditation on both the institutionalization of trans studies in Western academia and the material disregard of black people, trans people, migrants, and other oppressed and vulnerable people under the extractive regimes of cisheteropatriarchial white supremacy.

Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Narrative Performance

This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document