| Popis: |
This chapter examines how colorism influenced perceptions of self and agency for people of African descent during the Jim Crow era. I pay particular attention to the formerly enslaved woman’s experience in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, arguing that even though they share the experience of having been enslaved, they were not equally situated in those experiences. I offer an intra-racial, intersectional reading of the two, as I puzzle through possible differences in their decision-making due to colorism. Significant to my discussion is the way gender factors into their experiences. For the mother in Johnson’s novel, her proximity to whiteness allows her admittance into a society that configures whiteness within a patriarchal system. Subscription to that system, I argue, proves consequential for how she locates and wields power. My reading of Morrison’s Beloved, however, indicates that being rejected by such a system due to colorism does not necessarily lead to defeat. The character Baby Suggs challenges its dictates. Her reach for agency affords recently enslaved people new possibilities for imagining self within a paradigm of freedom. The analysis I offer, here, ultimately argues that colorism exacerbates the gender divide by reinforcing a hierarchical, white patriarchal system of governance. |
