Perspective development in the novels of Colson Whitehead : a cognitive narratological approach

Abstract

The notion of new black aesthetic has been gaining considerable attention in academia with Trey Ellis’s landmark essay, “The New Black Aesthetic”, which appeared in Callaloo in 1989. A similar term, ‘post-black’ gained artistic and scholarly interest since the late 1990s when it was coined by Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum of Harlem and the conceptual artist, Glenn Ligon to describe the liberating value in relieving the immense burden of race-wide representation. The term “post-soul aesthetic” was coined by Nelson George in 1992 to denote the diversity of blackness. With this literary course, a move away from essential notions of blackness without alluding to the past nostalgically has been noticed. These cultural critical discourses interlace race and racism in a way to reject their interaction, and emerge with the rise in prominence of a younger generation of African American artists and writers who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement. One such author who belongs to a new generation of African American writers is Colson Whitehead, who is often identified as developing a “post-soul”, “new black” or post-black aesthetic. The move away from associations of the past presumes a shift in the representation of black experience and identity in the 21st century, called as the era of post-blackness by American writer and cultural critic, Touré.