Black Writing White Reading Analysis

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The mosting interesting and exhaustive article on the matter was Elizabeth Abel's 'Black Writing, White Reading". This article focused on the racial ambiguity between Twyla and Roberta. Abel argues for the Blackness of Roberta using the historical context of the text and her response to social markers. In contrast to this, Abel uses that arguments of the Black feminist critic who introduced her to “Recitatif”, Lula Fragd, to rebuttal those who may claim that Roberta is in fact the Black one. Another prominent marker used in the article to differentiate between the Black character and the white one, is the analysis of actual historic marker of the 60’s and 70’s. Abel brings to question the race of Jimi Hendrix audiences at the height of his …show more content…
Her position as an influential African American writer in literature allows her to be interested in the past and reshape it. Often the terrible proceedings in Black Narratives and America’s history tend to be ignored or written over. While a scholar can try to believe that Twyla is black or try to be equally convincing that she is white, the real issue should be why it matters on the first place. With unconventional signifiers of racial difference, such as who smells funny to whom, who wears pink scalloped socks, tight green slacks, large hoop earrings, has a skill for playing jacks, or a taste for Jimi Hendrix, bottled water and chicken or asparagus, the terrain for tackling such a narrative becomes more diverse than the breadth of the social landscape given. This may be why it is such a tempting question to tackle, but below what's expected of scholars because there’s such larger question to be answered. In Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask, he sets Black and white men in opposition to each other to explain how race is identified.While Fanon’s text main focuses on the interaction between Black men and white men, a transposition of Freud’s man versus woman argument, it can still be used to address the main point in how readers respond to the Black or white mystery in Recitatif. By applying this to Abel and Stanley's interpretation of Morrison and her work one can prove that scholars act through subjective and personal bias. No matter which character is ‘the Black one’, at least one of them is, but the reader would never see the character to label them as Black. Fanon proposes that “the black man has no resistance to the eyes of the white man” (p. 110). Fanon explicitly covers males in his text, but gender is not subsidiary to cultural or racial difference. Black Skin, White Mask provides psychoanalytic theory on the experiences and
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