Description: The Tragic Black Buck examines the phenomenon, often paradoxical, of black males passing for white in American literature. Focusing on the first third of the twentieth century, this book argues that black individuals successfully assuming a white identity represent a paradox, in that passing for white exemplifies a challenge to the hegemonic philosophy of biological white supremacy, while denying blackness. Issues of race, gender, skin color, class, and law are examined in the literature of passing, involving the historical, theoretical, and literary tropes of miscegenation, mimicry, and masquerade. The narratives examined in The Tragic Black Buck are Charles Waddell Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and William Faulkner's Light in August.
Review Quotes: «Carlyle Van Thompson's study of black maleness as forms of mask and masquerade is brilliantly driving and fresh in its exploration of novels we thought we knew well. Boldest of all is Professor Thompson's discernment of the 'black buck' standing behind the flashy white exteriors of Jay Gatsby; but every chapter here has its audacious new findings. 'The Tragic Black Buck' will change the way we read canonical American literature as well as the current American scene, where masking and double-masking seem to define so much in our national identities. This book is a triumph.» (Robert G. O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University)
«'The Tragic Black Buck' is a worthy successor to the sort of imaginative literary reconstruction initiated in Toni Morrison's 'Playing in the Dark'. Her suggestive program of reading blackness as the implicit backdrop of white American literary and cultural identities is richly fleshed out in Carlyle Van Thompson's impressive volume. Joining Charles Waddell Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner in a single volume is a stroke of vivid literary reading. Too rarely have we had literary investigations that examine towering white and black figures as co-creators of an artistic convention and cultural practice. Thompson's interweaving of biographical and cultural features of these writers' lives and their novels furthers his sagacious argument about racial passing as a complex, evolving, and hence multi-textured practice and identity. The virtue of such a move is that it underscores how a racial practice like passing is never simply a one-sided affair. Professor Thompson shows us in lucid fashion how white and black identities are never the sole possession of black and white people. Blackness and whiteness are created out of the complex and intricate interplay between cultural, racial, and social forces that are larger than a fastidiously bi-polar paradigm suggests.» (Michael Eric Dyson, Avaion Foundation Professor of Humanities and African-American Studies, the University of Pennsylvania)