Well-Wrought Black Thought: Speculative Realism and the Specter of Race

IF 0.8 2区文学 0 LITERATURE

New Literary History Pub Date : 2022-06-01 DOI:10.1353/nlh.2022.0020

K. Roy

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract:This essay presents a method for analyzing literary and cultural texts that I call black thought. Black thought reveals how changing the skin color of a protagonist in modern Western literature would result in an ontological crisis of coherence within the text because its historically contingent racial codes, genre-based discursive conventions, internal plot structure, and governing registers would summarily fail. At this point of collapse, we can ask questions such as “why couldn’t this character be read as legibly black (or white)?” at the given historical moment or, “what elements of this work’s governing structure would have to change so that a particular character could be plausibly read under a different racial category?” Through exemplifying the practice of black thought in the writings of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, as well as Arthur Laurents’s 1946 play Home of the Brave, Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle, and the artwork of Diego Velázquez vis-à-vis Kerry James Marshall, I show how students and scholars would benefit from seeking to determine why changing the race of a work’s protagonist would necessitate the creation of a fundamentally different text or historical context, which brings the study of literature into conversation with other fields, such as political theory, history, sociology, and psychology.

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精心打造的黑色思想:思辨现实主义与种族的幽灵

摘要：本文提出了一种分析文学和文化文本的方法，我称之为黑人思想。黑人思想揭示了改变现代西方文学中主人公的肤色将如何导致文本中连贯性的本体论危机，因为其历史上偶然的种族密码、基于流派的话语惯例、内部情节结构和统治语域将彻底失败。在这个崩溃的时刻，我们可以问一些问题，比如在给定的历史时刻，“为什么这个字符不能读成清晰的黑色（或白色）？”，“这部作品的统治结构中的哪些元素必须改变，才能在不同的种族类别下合理地解读一个特定的角色？”通过在托尼·莫里森、简·奥斯汀、拉尔夫·埃里森、理查德·赖特和切斯特·希姆斯的作品中，以及阿瑟·劳伦斯1946年的戏剧《勇敢的家》中，举例说明黑人思想的实践，Amma Asante 2013年的电影《美女》，以及Diego Velázquez与Kerry James Marshall的艺术作品，我展示了学生和学者如何从试图确定为什么改变作品主人公的种族需要创造一个根本不同的文本或历史背景中受益，这将文学研究带入与其他领域的对话中，如政治理论、历史、社会学和心理学。

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来源期刊

New Literary History LITERATURE-

CiteScore

1.50

自引率

11.10%

发文量

期刊介绍： New Literary History focuses on questions of theory, method, interpretation, and literary history. Rather than espousing a single ideology or intellectual framework, it canvasses a wide range of scholarly concerns. By examining the bases of criticism, the journal provokes debate on the relations between literary and cultural texts and present needs. A major international forum for scholarly exchange, New Literary History has received six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.