Du Bois's construction of African American racial consciousness. This gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality….Īs this passage demonstrates, Johnson's novel is the first to give voice in fictional form to “the Veil,” W. It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks…. It is this, too, which makes the colored people of this country, in reality, a mystery to the whites. Though in some ways conforming to the conventional novel of passing in suggesting that a mixed racial heritage makes a person incapable of functioning in either the black or the white world, Johnson's novel turns this notion on its head by invoking double consciousness, as his narrator makes clear: Originally published anonymously in 1912, James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man advances the narrative of the “tragic mulatto” who passes for white beyond the constraints imposed by the form as it was practiced in nineteenth-century American literature.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |