Imagining Freedom in a Post-Emancipation “Pigmentocracy”
Wallace Thurman, Toni Morrison, and Tupac Shakur
- 1University of York, UK
- Naomi Popple, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. Email:Naomi.popple@york.ac.uk
Abstract
This article focuses on the above mentioned artists’ endeavors to imagine, advocate, and/or articulate freedom in a “pigmentocra[tic],” 20th-century America. As any definition of freedom is reciprocally determined—to imagine freedom is to imagine freedom from something—I will specify what that something is (or somethings are) and assess the relative successes and failures of the variously presented strategies of resistance, destruction, and/or escape. For example, Pecola in The Bluest Eyeimagines that emancipation from the quotidian familial violence she is a victim of pivots on a change in her appearance or her absolute disappearance. By contrast, in the same novel, Claudia exhibits a precocious capacity to recognize the potentially harmful power of grand narratives. I have chosen “imagining” in the title as it acknowledges freedom’s conceptual dynamism and subjectivity, that it is being explored (mainly) through fiction, and crucially, that freedom–for some African Americans– remains a fiction.