Visioning the Body Mosaic: Enchanted Transracial Selfhood in Postsecular American Literature
Twentieth-century literature and theory have offered no shortage of challenges to the unity of personal identity. What such undertakings leave largely unquestioned, however, is the prevailing understanding of the individual as sealed within the circumference of the physical body. Emerging from a mat...
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| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
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European journal of American studies
2015
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | Twentieth-century literature and theory have offered no shortage of challenges to the unity of personal identity. What such undertakings leave largely unquestioned, however, is the prevailing understanding of the individual as sealed within the circumference of the physical body. Emerging from a matrix of “postsecular” texts—by Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison—is a counter-argument to such a notion of selfhood. This paper explores the ways in which this recent American literature re-imagines the human self as porous and energetic and capable of deep inter-ontological communion with other open selves across space. Drawing upon a rich history of the “energetic self” in the American imagination, this literature uses the open self as gateway to forms of intersubjective attunement and cross-racial identification that ultimately transcend nefarious racial-identitarian categories. |
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