| Popis: |
Chapter 4 centers on the unnamed protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). It argues that the narrator’s musical talent together with his nearly white skin allows him to vacillate between multiple racialized spaces. The focus of this chapter is an investigation of how the narrator’s musical aptitude with ragtime automatically makes him Black, while his sacrifice of those abilities and his pursuit of excellence in classic music are somehow able to do what even his racially-indeterminate body cannot do alone—that is, make him white. This chapter explores the relationship of embodiment to musical expression. Observing how the unnamed protagonist embodies certain racial, sexual, or musical identities and/or how certain types of music (dis)embodies these identities is an important consideration here. In a thread that is continued from the previous chapter, chapter 4 examines the nuances between the narrator as performer and the narrator as audience or listener in order to remark on how the former depends heavily upon the latter for validation. Ultimately, the chapter proposes that Johnson’s pale-skinned narrator in Autobiography creates a fluidity of racial, gender, and musical identity for the protagonist. |
