"A lot of Indian in his face": The Native American presence in twentieth-century African American autobiography

This thesis interrogates literary interracialism between Native Americans and African Americans in twentieth-century black autobiography. Prefaced by analysis of the slave narrative tradition, my emphasis falls upon autobiography as the most formative genre in Afro-American letters. Ante- and post-bellum narratives offered an evocative platform for public scrutiny, political agitation, and moral suasion. The presence of Native Americans has had a formative but undervalued effect on the politicized self-scrutiny of twentieth-century life writing. Slavery, for instance, was a legacy both endured and perpetuated by Native peoples. The relatively large numbers of Native slaves and the extent of Native slave-owning have not received due recognition by literary historians and critics of black literature. Chapter two examines Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945). I demonstrate how Wright's seemingly minor deployment of the Noble Savage stereotype corresponds to a desire for creative freedom. Here, the quest to establish a legitimate and assertive literary voice in the Deep South during Jim Crow foreshadows the problem of asserting a non-conformist political identity in the McCarthy era. Chapter one explores Langston Hughes' The Big Sea (1940). His quest for racial authenticity uses genealogical hybridity (more specifically, his Metis grandmother's) as his imaginative catalyst. He accentuates her "Indian-ness" in order to construct a differential and essentialized African persona. For Hughes, the ability to negotiate between inchoate identities---Afro-American, Native American, African, and mixed-blood---offered not a liberating choice of selves, but rather a paralyzing anxiety about not belonging anywhere. Although the imaginative function of Natives varies according to the text and author examined, these three autobiographers treat them as conduits for their own negotiation of racial identity. Each uses an interpretation of "Native-ness" to reassess racial alterity and shed light on intellectual and imaginative discourses traditionally separated from, or polarized by, prevailing assumptions by dominant Anglo-American society. Chapter three illuminates Colored People (1994) by public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates' mixed-blood, Afro-Native American uncle embodies and yet reconfigures the popular archetype of the Native-as-Nature's-Child. I evaluate whether this is a pejorative and regressive construction or a nostalgic tribute to a heroic and quintessentially American version of frontier mythmaking.

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