Abstract
Images matter, and when they are reinforced in literary texts, they help to shape identity, some true, some false. What can we learn about the aesthetics of writers who have created texts with characters defined by a skin color different from their own? Does the period in which the texts are set and published make a difference in how we should apprehend them? These questions are not new. Scholars such as Richard Jackson, in his The Black Image in Latin American Literature (1976), David Dabydeen, editor of The Black Presence in English Literature (1970), Wilfred Cartey’s important comparative exploration of Caribbean poetry in Black Images (1970), and Lemuel Johnson’s The Devil, the Gargoyle and the Buffoon: the Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature (1969) have long interrogated these issues. More recently, claims about appropriation and psychological misinterpretation have inspired writers such as Toni Morrison to revisit these question in relation to texts by Americans. Because the study of literature is central in academic curricula, these questions remain relevant to our understanding of literature’s place in the shaping or reinforcement of perceptions. This paper engages in explorations of how a play by William Shakespeare and a novel by Jean Rhy shape, complicate, and reinforce images of what Lemuel Johnson called “Blackness in human form.”
Presenters
Brenda FlanaganThe Edward Armfield Senior Professor of English, Department of English Language and Literature and Africana Studies, Davidson College, North Carolina, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
LITERARY RACISM, LITERARY AESTHETICS
