"Aggravatin' Papa": Race, Omission, and Discursive Liminality in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.36118Abstract
My essay constructs a postcolonial theoretical framework to investigate a scene in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. The scene suggests that an African-American character--a musician performing the popular jazz song "Aggravatin' Papa"--may share a sexual history with the novel's white female protagonist. The text strategically silences the black character's voice at several moments in the dialogue. By exhuming the musician's lyrics and showcasing the silenced voice in this intertextual relationship, I argue that the marginalized minority voice is, in fact, central to Hemingway’s modernist experimentation. In the very process of its appropriation and silencing in the novel, the black presence bursts forth from its liminal discursive space and intervenes in the narrative’s construction of difference.References
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