مشخصات پژوهش

صفحه نخست /Overt Challenging of ...
عنوان
Overt Challenging of Jim Crowism in the Short Stories of Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children
نوع پژوهش مقاله چاپ شده
کلیدواژه‌ها
Jim Crowism; Overt Defiance; Uncle Tomism; Uncle Tom's Children
چکیده
Richard Wright’s second edition of his collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1940), entails both hidden and open forms of defiance against Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism. In the opening essay of this collection, namely, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” Wright enlists nine lessons of his nonviolent activities to fight back White oppression. In “The Introductory Essay: Richard Wright’s Covert Challenging of Jim Crowism and Uncle Tomism” (2010b), I restricted the study to four out of nine of Wright’s lessons, two from the beginning and two from the ending of the essay, to stress Wright’s “evasive actions, and his covert activities, such as silence, playing the role of the Monkey trickster in the library, lying consistently to whites if this act did not question his life and ‘sly civility,’ to fight the humiliation imposed by Jim Crow laws and customs back.” Thus, in that article, Wright’s four proactive acts of defiance have been studied. In this article, however, I intend to focus on four short stories of Uncle Tom’s Children in which the fictional characters, comprising a community of Black children, Black men, and a Black woman, turn to more visible and overt forms of resistance against Jim Crowism by resorting to guns. Since individualistic acts of defiance occurred four times in five stories of the collection, it is necessary to study them. This study has excluded “Fire and Cloud” because it employs a communal and nonviolent act of defiance against White oppressors by marching for food. Except for “Fire and Cloud,” in all stories firearms are employed as ameans of overt defiance. Toward the end of the stories, as I propose, there is an advance from unpremeditated but justified self-defense to purposeful open defiance using guns. Both in Wright’s own covert, yet proactive, acts of defiance in the introductory essay and in the overt yet reactive and individualistic acts of resistance against White oppressors in the short storie
پژوهشگران احد مهروند (نفر اول)