Racial Performativity In The Big Sea

This thesis studies The Big Sea written by Langston Hughes.Inspired by performativity theories and the studies of the biography and autobiography,I explore the different kinds of racial performance in Hughes's first autobiography,suggesting that racial performativity is situational,constructive and influenced by social norms.Influenced by the tradition of the autobiographical study which tends to examine the relation among the writing self,written self and constructed self,I analyzed three different kinds of racial performativity in this work.That is the racial performativity of the written self,passing performed by people known by Hughes and Hughes's textual racial performativity when he takes his autobiography for performing a New Negro artist in the Harlem Renaissance."Performativity" was initially used in Austin's speech act theory.Inspired by scholars like Derrida and Althusser,Butler proposes performativity in her queer theory,suggesting that gender identification is constructed,resulting from repetitive citations of the social norms.Based on Butler's concept of performativity,Rottenberg develops the idea of racial performativity.The concept of performativity is taken in the study of autobiographies,suggesting that autobiographical texts can be understood as acts of performativity.As a concept,performativity emphasizes that identification is resulted from performative acts rather than born and it is a situational performance.Racial performativity concerns the different identification of the colored people in different situations.From the perspective of racial performativity,African Americans are not inferior by birth.They can perform new identities in certain situations.The situational racial identification decides the diversity and differences in the black performativity.In The Big Sea,the black performativity can be in the form of different black identification in the different social cultural situations.It can be in the form of passing.It can be in form of the textual performativity of the written self of the autobiography.For exploring these three different kinds of black performativity in Hughes's autobiography,this thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One explores Hughes's different identification in African,in Europe and in America,suggesting that different social norms in different places lead to different racial identification.The writing self of Hughes's autobiography,in editing and presenting his past experiences,displays in details his experienced situational identification,revealing the situationality of.racial performativity Chapter two analyzes passing for the white,revealing Hughes's criticism of it with the reason that passing strengthens the white and black hierarchy,leading to the conflicts among the black.It suggests that Hughes's criticizing of passing paves way for his proposing of constructing new black identities.Chapter three explores Hughes's racial performativity in textual form,suggesting that he uses autobiography as the stage for performing a new negro artist.Hughes performs the role of a New Negro artist by infusing the black blues as well as quoting the white sea literatue in his book,displaying his double cultural heritages.Hughes also strengthens such an image by juxtaposing his personal life with the vicissitude of Harlem Renaissance.