Visioning the Body Mosaic: Enchanted Transracial Selfhood in Postsecular American Literature
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Twentieth-century literature and theory have offered no shortage of challenges to the unity of personal identity. What such undertakings leave largely unquestioned, however, is the prevailing understanding of the individual as sealed within the circumference of the physical body. Emerging from a matrix of “postsecular” texts—by Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison—is a counter-argument to such a notion of selfhood. This paper explores the ways in which this recent American literature re-imagines the human self as porous and energetic and capable of deep inter-ontological communion with other open selves across space. Drawing upon a rich history of the “energetic self” in the American imagination, this literature uses the open self as gateway to forms of intersubjective attunement and cross-racial identification that ultimately transcend nefarious racial-identitarian categories.
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.11082
Author: Erick Sierra
Institution: Trinity Christian College
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1165753708