Reconstructing Americanness: Blackness, whiteness, and American national identity, 1954--1972 (John A. Williams, Jack Kerouac, William Styron, John Updike)

This dissertation examines national identity during the Second Reconstruction, a period when race moved to the foreground as America struggled to live up to its ideal of freedom for all its citizens. Through intertextual readings of texts by black and white American novelists, I examine the changing vision of how this ideal could be achieved and the impact of the black freedom movement on racial and national identity.; I explore the changing ideology within the black freedom movement through readings of John A. Williams' Night Song (1961), The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and Captain Blackman (1972), novels that reflect the evolution from the ideal of color-blindness promoted by the Civil Rights Movement to the color-consciousness of the Black Power Movement. At the same time, I examine white America's evolving attitudes toward blackness, whiteness, and Americanness through readings of texts by three white American novelists. I analyze the romanticized view of blackness articulated in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and the controversy that came to surround William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a novel that was attacked as a racist text despite its author's intention to support the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. My analysis of the Vietnam era pairs Williams' Captain Blackman with John Updike's Rabbit Redux (1971) to illustrate how the Vietnam War became a catalyst for Black Power's critique of America that would lead many white Americans toward a negative view of the nation.; Ultimately, I argue that the black freedom movement had an impact on American society beyond the rights it won for African Americans. Through its efforts to transform the meaning of blackness, this movement rearticulated the meaning of whiteness and initiated a critique of American society that worked to redefine what it means to be an American. Along with other social forces unleashed during this period, the black freedom movement moved America away from a national identity based on an assimilationist ideology toward an identity based on cultural pluralism, the founding principle of contemporary multiculturalism.