Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Portugal, Jose Alberto

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

This thesis is a close reading of the Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, a novel by James Weldon Johnson. I focus on the protagonist’s relationship to minstrelsy, spectatorship, and his psychological allegiance to whiteness. In doing so, I also highlight how his psychology as both narrator and protagonist is directed by a desire to pursue whiteness. My intent is to “read away” the undertones of tragedy of Johnson’s “tragic mulatto” first-person narrative, to consider the irony and satire of the narrator’s white supremacist attitudes he holds towards blacks. The narrator’s white gaze beguiles the attempts he makes to create himself as a racialized subjectivity. It is ultimately impossible for the mixed-race protagonist – a spectator to, and performer of, blackness – to “uplift” the race, as he claims to want to do: his self-fashioning as a “tragic mulatto” figure becomes ultimately contradicted by his alliance to the values of white supremacy.

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