Charting Trey Ellis' New Black Aesthetic Through Platitudes And Home Repairs

Trey Ellis is an excellent African American novelist who comes to critical attention in the late-twentieth century.Since the publication of his manifesto essay "The New Black Aesthetic" in 1989,he has produced several novels,including Platitudes and Home Repairs.The essence of New Black Aesthetic is to break the shackle of literary tradition on "post-black/post soul African American writers,and call for African Americans to define their real and complicated black identity without fear of the black world or the white world.Although Ellis' novels have aroused wide concern in academic world,systematic study on how he charts his New Black Aesthetic through his novels is surprisingly inadequate.Therefore,based on the analysis of his two major novels:Platitudes and Home Repairs,this thesis exemplifies how Trey Ellis charts his New Black Aesthetic from the perspective of both his formal and thematic concerns.To begin with,Platitudes' notion of the New Black Aesthetic is underscored through the dramatization of conflict of aesthetic ideals between two writers representing two opposite poles.While the protagonist Dewayne Wellington is a literary nobody who tries to write in an experimentally postmodernist way,his literary counselor Isshee Ayam is the gate-keeper of African American literary tadition.Finally,Dewayne not only overcomes his misogynistic and race-oblivious penchant in writing,but also successfully changes Isshee' s views on postmodernist experimentation.Besides,in Platitudes,the epistolary mode,meta-fiction as well as the theme of breaking the black/white dichotomy all challenge the traditional notions of black literature,which can be deemed as Ellis' exemplification of what New Black Aesthetic is through the act of writing itself.Secondly,Ellis imagines what art means for an African American writer in "post-soul" age by centering on the image of cultural mulatto in Home Repairs.The Protagonist Austin McMillan is a downright cultural mulatto:he is no longer Ralph Ellison' s invisible man,no longer confined by the Duboisian "double consciousness," and no longer possessing the culturally stereotyped masculinity expected by the reading public.Ellis makes use of the journal form to have his protagonist Austin McMillan reject the outward cultural fashioning by rewriting himself in his own diary.Through self-inspection by reading his own diary,Austin finally establishes his own Black masculinity and accomplishes his own self definition.For lack of existing relevant research,this thesis is but an attempt at reading Ellis'New Black Aesthetic through his first two novels,an attc npt that would hopefully contribute to a better understanding of Ellis' New Black Aesthetic.