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영어

This paper aims to read Nella Larsen’s Passing and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of Ex-Coloured Man in view of power relations propounded in Hegel’s master-slave relationship. The main issue this paper recognises regarding Hegel’s idea is that people are seeking recognition from others and this involves power relations. Hegel illustrates the power relations with his well-known master-slave model where it can lead to a cultural element. A socio-cultural attitude regarding black people presumably triggered the novels in question. This is where this paper discovers a sense of power-relations lurking in the novels. They show the characters’ reshaping self-identity and faking their identity which American culture has given birth to over its history in relation to the racial differences. It defines a black person as anyone with any “discernible” amount of “colored” or “African” blood. The novels dramatise people who look undiscernibly black and their struggle to get a recognition on their fabricated identity and the power relations revolve on the strife for the recognition. Hegelian idea of slave-bondsman relation is interpretably implemented in this paper to offer the power relations in the synthetic movement which is a more general, trans-racial sense of American identity that might be constructed in moving toward social and cultural equality.