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The Journey towards Castration: Interracial Sexual Stereotypes in Ellison's Invisible Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
In our society it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to lay.
(Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 304)
It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one's own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others.
(James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York, 1961), p. 172)
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971
References
page 227 note 1 As James Baldwin likes to point out, the reason he is light brown is not that his grandmother raped his grandfather. The sexual myth seems to be a compulsive defence of white Protestants in an exploitive racial position. The exploited oriental workers who settled in Western Canada after the building of the trans-continental railroad were victims of similar tales. As a result, early legislation forbade white women to work in Chinese businesses or be alone in Chinese restaurants and, as late as 1913, the Vancouver School Board triumphantly announced the completion of a programme to segregate Chinese boys at age 13 (puberty) from white girls.
page 228 note 1 Quotations are from the Signet edition of Invisible Man (New York, 1952)Google Scholar
page 229 note 1 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Totem and Taboo’, trans. Strachey, James, in Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIII (London, 1955), p. 32.Google Scholar
page 230 note 1 Freud, , ‘Totem and Taboo’, p. 32.Google Scholar
page 230 note 2 Ellison himself mentions the black myth in Shadow and Act, pp. 134–5.Google Scholar The white version is explored by Cash, W. J. in his The Mind of the South (New York, 1941)Google Scholar, under the reference ‘The cult of Southern Womanhood’.
page 231 note 1 Nobody Knows My Name, p. 151.Google Scholar