Liberation of perception: Evil's emergence in 20th century African American fiction (Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Charles Johnson)

This thesis examines the emergence of evil as an imaginative trope in late twentieth century African American fiction. Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Charles Johnson, Alice Walker, and their literary predecessor, Richard Wright, constitute the core of a radical strain in black literature in which evil serves as a means of expanding and transforming the complex potential of black subjectivity. By removing evil from black-white binaries and locating it entirely in black individuals and communities, these authors liberate black character from the bonds of white supremacist stereotype on the one side, and the propaganda of black benevolence on the other.; The unspeakable sufferings of the Middle Passage, the brutality of New World slavery, and the protracted pressures of white supremacy would seem to promise a black American literature on close terms with evil. But black authors, from the slave narratives forward, have most often responded to their embattled social condition by crafting works that, perhaps in deference to political aims, practiced a careful evasion of evil. These writers often rendered what Sterling Brown calls black “plaster of pans saints,” consciously constraining their characters' full moral complexity in the name of positive image-making. The authors I identify employ evil—both as a sign, but also as enacted in malevolence and violence—as a means of liberation. By opening black characters up to evil these authors do not confirm racial stereotype, as was feared by many of their predecessors, but rather expand the potential for expressing human truths in the particulars of black life.; The Liberation of Perception offers a means through which to interpret African American writers' varied attempts to come to terms with the nature of evil. Rather than providing a single definition of evil (something centuries of philosophical speculation has been unable to produce) this study offers a range of understandings drawn from the particulars of each author's imagination. The ideas of evil that emerge offer not simply a fuller expression of black humanity but a clearer articulation of the ways that the particulars of black American experience contribute to our understanding of being in general.