Drawing the (Color)line: Hemingway's America, Africa, and the Question(ing) of Authority

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  • March 20, 2019
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  • Dudley, Marc Kevin
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Abstract
  • My examination asserts that Ernest Hemingway's modernity lies beyond mere stylistic technique and aesthetic concerns and finds itself in what perhaps is an inadvertent appreciation of W.E. B. Du Bois' prognostication that race would be the pervasive issue for a "progressive" nation looking to the first decades of the twentieth century. I contend that Hemingway not only shares Faulkner's concerns with the issue of race in America, but that he takes them well beyond the bounds of the South or any particular region and extends them to the rest of the nation. Little to nothing has been said about Hemingway's investment in issues of race; this examination intends to end that relative silence. Hemingway's marked interest in race (de)formation is closely aligned to a vested national interest in and an anxiety over a rapidly changing American racial topography and issues of American (White) identity. The works in this examination become then an expression of what I will call a collective angst in the wake of a perpetually fading color line and, correspondingly, an ever-eroding Anglo power structure. Hemingway's reaction is a simultaneous questioning of (White) self-identity and coveted authoritarian right and a marked re-entrenchment in standard racial typology. The so-called Indian stories work well to explore ideas of miscegenation (I use this term broadly to suggest race mixing and influence in a general sense) and White "vulnerability," and they attest to the author's ambivalence. Hemingway's African American centered stories continue this exploration of color-line transgression and the deconstruction of White identity, with the added element of violence as a possible means to that end. Thus, Africa becomes Hemingway's imaginative enclave of Anglo agency. Moreover, imperial Africa (more specifically, the metaphorical, geopolitical space inhabited by the Anglo) becomes the site within which he, as White subject-self, can control the placement, demarcation, and enforcement of that coveted colorline. This very emphatic racial awareness, nonetheless, is what also draws Hemingway into the realm of the Modern.
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  • In Copyright
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  • Ludington, Townsend
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  • Open access
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  • October 19, 2010

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