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Waking Cain: The Poetics of Integration in Charles Johnson's "Dreamer" |
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| Author |
Whalen-Bridge, John (著)
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| Source |
Callaloo
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| Volume | v.26 n.2 |
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| Date | 2003 |
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| Pages | 504 - 521 |
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| Publisher | The Johns Hopkins University Press |
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| Publisher Url |
http://www.press.jhu.edu/
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| Location | Baltimore, MD, US [巴爾的摩, 馬里蘭州, 美國] |
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| Content type | 期刊論文=Journal Article |
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| Language | 英文=English |
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| Keyword | 佛教教義=Buddhist Doctrines=Buddhist Teachings; 佛教文學=Buddhist Literature |
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| Abstract | In an essay on African Americans in relation to Buddhism, Charles Johnson interprets Martin Luther King, Jr., as a kind of Buddhist exemplar. Johnson writes of King that His dream of the 'beloved community' is a Sangha by another name, for King believed that, 'It really boils down to this: that all of life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.' Johnson's King is very much a bodhisattva dedicated to the idea of healing-throughintegration, and Johnson's artistic ambition has been to develop a poetics of integration which cultivates political, aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual forms of integration. To resist the ways in which racism has "epidermalized Being," Johnson combines the ideal of racial integration with various philosophical and religious discourses that profess a redemptive vision of human inter-subjectivity, particularly Buddhism. Dreamer presents the reader with five specific divisions, which I will discuss in five sections to follow, that obstruct the realizable world that King termed "beloved community": (1) essentialist claims about human identity, which are in the novel dialogically answered by Buddhist claims that no such inherent identity exists; (2) class divisions between middle-class and poor blacks, which Johnson links to the rise of Black Power and contemporary American identity politics; (3) the segregation of American literary history by focusing on ethnic sub-traditions exclusively; (4) religious mythic doctrine that, improperly understood, authorizes divisive thinking; and (5) the of canonization" that has enshrined King's memory only to contain it so that it does not become the basis for social action. At the end of Johnson's most politically engaged novel to date, King is slain and America is ready to forget his deeper message, but the narrator of Dreamer, Matthew Bishop, has learned that the aforementioned obstacles are in reality doorways to "beloved community." |
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| Table of contents | 1. "... that Mysterious Dichotomy Inscribed at the Heart of Things" 504
2. Class Consciousness and the Racial Shadow 508
3. The Black Dharma Bum 511
4. Waking Cain 513
5. Lifting the "Curse of Canonization" 515
NOTES 518
WORKS CITED 520 |
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| ISSN | 01612492 (P); 10806512 (E) |
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| Hits | 360 |
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| Created date | 2003.11.14
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| Modified date | 2024.01.17 |
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