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标题：“Disinterested” White Culture Broker, Naïve Black Native Informant and the Formation of the Exotic Subaltern: A Spivakean Reading of Carl Van Vechten’s Role in the Harlem Renaissance
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作者：Maryam Soltan Beyad ; Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand
期刊名称：Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures & Societies
印刷版ISSN：1948-1845
电子版ISSN：1948-1853
出版年度：2012
卷号：3
期号：3-4
出版社：Wright State University
摘要：Since Columbus‟ landing in the America in the fifteenth century, the Western mind has begun to Otherize the negroid either as a debased brute or a noble savage. Both of these stereotypical representations of the non-white Other, albeit incompatible and opposite on the surface, were employed by Westerners as the logical and moral justification of the colonization enterprise which needed to demote the colonized to the status of sub-human creatures. In the 1980s, Gayatri Spivak,deeply concerned with the status of minorities and marginalized groups, noticed the role of the First World intelligentsia in the construction of the exotic subaltern through the long-employed techniques of categorization and stereotyping. Reprimanding Western intelligentsia for their disinterested guise and also native informants for their complicity with the dominant power, she held them accountable for the perpetuation of the exotic representation of the subaltern in the Western consciousness. This article aims to analyze the role of Carl Van Vechten, the controversial white writer, in popularizing the primitive-exotic image of black Americans in 1920s United States. Van Vechten‟s primitivist representational strategy became so fashionable among Harlem Renaissance writers that within a short period of time, many of them reproduced the image of the primitive Negro in their works. Through an application of Spivak‟s theory of the subaltern, this article attempts to show that the seemingly positive portrait of the exotic black was as detrimental to the status of African Americans as the deep-seated negative stereotypes.
关键词：Spivak; First World intelligentsia; native informant; exotic subaltern; Van Vechten; ;Harlem Renaissance; primitivism