Passing Through Europe: Race and National Identity in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Year 2001, Issue: 13, 23 - 32, 01.04.2001

Anne Bombergen

Abstract

With the flourishing of multiculturalism and debate about racial politics in the texts of people of color, a growing interest in critiques of whiteness as a racial category has developed. Foundational texts like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination call for the study of race in texts by white authors, particularly, although not exclusively, on those texts which rely on minor Africanist characters at crucial moments and which draw extensively on the language of whiteness and blackness, even when these references do not explicitly address race. Other studies like Richard Dyer’s White take broader approaches to the study of whiteness by focusing on the associations between whiteness, light, and virtue in interdisciplinary, multicentury cultural analyses. Still other texts examine more narrow constructions of whiteness, as in Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, which uses detailed interviews with white women as a starting point for analysis about race in white women’s lives. What all of these texts have in common is a desire to investigate the functions of whiteness—a category all acknowledge pulls together extremely diverse groups of people— as a broad cultural category.

References

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