Literary works describing the struggle against slavery essay
There are many literary works that are no longer explicitly organized around the struggle to end slavery. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the main theme unifying these more contemporary fictions. Three texts that will be discussed in this paper are James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George Schuyler’s Black No More and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. These literary works describe the major conflicts of African American history that refer to the struggle against slavery. The authors of these novels provide the slave narratives that highlight the sentimental ideas regarding the struggle against racism. It is necessary to recognize the authors’ need to identify historical impact of contemporary literature on the representation of race relations. The literary works reflect the negative effects of the Jim Crow Era on African Americans, placing emphasis on the ability of literature to address racial violence and “see race through the lens of otherhood” (Lavender 63). Thesis statement: Three literary works, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George Schuyler’s Black No More and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, are focused on representation of the complexity of race relations which affect the further struggle to end slavery in American society.
In the novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) written by James Weldon Johnson, the key theme is criticism of race relations. The author of the slave narrative discussed the role of human identity in solving the problems caused by both interracial and intra-racial conflicts and violence. The novel tells about the life of a young biracial man, named as the “Ex-Colored Man”, who lived America in the late nineteenth century. He had to make a choice between two racial classes: blacks and whites. He could embrace his black heritage and become the African-American musician or to live as an ordinary middle-class white man. The author depicts lynching as a vivid example of racial violence caused by white supremacy. The author shows how a black man was burnt alive by a white mob. He writes about the victim of the lynching scene, “He squirmed, he writhed, strained in his chains, then gave out cries and groans that I shall always hear” (Johnson 83). The Ex-Colored Man, influenced by this event, makes a decision to pass as white man. James Weldon Johnson’s representation of race relations is based on violence.
In George Schuyler’s novel Black No More (1931), the race problem in America is discussed to place emphasis on the existing racial differences. The author of the novel uses satire to criticize racial relation. The author tells the story of a black man Max Disher who uses scientific transformation process to become a white man Mathew Fisher. In fact, the author criticizes the existing race relations through representation of the skin color of his protagonist who becomes “black no more” (Schuyler 78). In the novel Black No More, the author highlights the significance of the race problem in American society. He uses satire to depict the functioning of the myth of race purity caused by the existence of white supremacy. Racism described by the author is used to serve economic purposes, which reflect greed as the major motivation of the main characters in their actions. The racist environment, in which the main characters live, depends on racial differences between the blacks and the whites. Thus, the main character Max is rejected by a white woman Helen because she is a racist. However, Max makes a decision to remove his blackness to become closer to Helen. The change of black population to white leads to serious economic problems in American society because the cheapest black labor force is lost.
In Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), the reader is given an opportunity to assess a more complex representation of race relations in America. The author shows how African Americans address the history of “racial Othering” and the ways to struggle for their identity. In the novel Kindred, the main character Dana, an African American woman, has a chance to be transported from the year 1976 to the early nineteenth century. She comes from Los Angeles to Maryland in order to meet her ancestors. She meets a white man Rufus and his slave Alice, a young African American woman. Alice was not a born-slave, as she was forced into slavery later in her life. Octavia Butler is focused on the use of time travel and the effects of genetic engineering to interrogate the historical paradigms of slavery in America. The novel Kindred is considered to be a neo-slave narrative that reflects historical reality of slavery in America. The author writes about race relations of white and black people living in the eighteenth century, “they lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt” (Butler 196).
Thus, it is necessary to conclude that many novels in American literature are focused on representation of the struggle against slavery, but the authors use different approaches to highlight race relations and solve race-related problems. Three novels discussed in this paper, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George Schuyler’s Black No More and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, are based on slave narratives that reflect the complicated relationships between slaves and their masters, and the relationships between the blacks and the whites, through shame, hatred and violence.
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