부산대학교 도서관

Summary: A thematic study grounded in the historical violence and mythologies surrounding interracial sexuality, my dissertation examines the manner in which African American and white authors of the Harlem and Southern Renaissances explore the "black beast" stereotype for its psychological and social ramifications. The sexual exploitation of African American women in the antebellum South evolved into the myth of the African American male rapist in the postbellum South. White supremacist efforts succeeded largely in relegating the historical and ongoing violation of black women to the back of the (white) national conscience, while promulgating the definitive set of segregation-era myths in which social equality, miscegenation, and the rape of white women by black men came to be virtually synonymous in southern white minds. I argue that three paradigms of thought dominated segregation-era considerations of black male sexuality and concomitant violence: white supremacist (Thomas Dixon, Jr.), protest (Ida B. Wells), and psychological-historical (W. J. Cash). The cultural anxieties surrounding African American male sexuality provide a fundamental link between the Harlem and Southern Renaissances, and these anxieties should be considered a crucial element of the ongoing efforts to understand how the two renaissances arose (in part) from the same environment of southern race relations in the first half of the twentieth century. While my project engages the scholarly efforts to delineate the southern roots of the Harlem Renaissance, it also challenges traditional notions of regional and racial influence during the period by arguing that the writers of the Harlem Renaissance influenced their southern white contemporaries, particularly with regard to depictions of the black beast image. I pursue this argument by examining how the image informs characters' racial identity, communal violence, and African American resistance in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Erskine Caldwell, and Richard Wright.