Hemingway Race and Art: Bloodlines and the Color Line

About this book

A social historical reading of Hemingway through the lens of race William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early-twentieth-century South. In Hemingway Race and Art author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkners racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingways fascination with and eventual push toward the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche and to challenge and unsettle it too. Twentieth-century white America was plagued by guilt in its dealings with Native Americans; simultaneously it faced an increasingly dissatisfied African American populace. Marc Kevin Dudley demonstrates how Hemingways interest in race was closely aligned to a national anxiety over a changing racial topography. Affected by his American pedigree his masculinity and his whiteness Hemingways treatment of race is characteristically complex at once both a perpetuation of type and a questioning of white self-identity. Hemingway Race and Artexpands our understanding of Hemingway and his work and shows how race consciousness pervades the texts of one of Americas most important and influential writers.