“Abandoning This Sinking Ship America”: The Classical Bildungsroman, Minor Characters, and the Negative Dialectic of Race in Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle

Abstract

This article explores the way The White Boy Shuffle delinks American citizenship’s hold on Black political subjectivity. Through a narrative analysis of Shuffle’s protagonist and minor characters, the author argues that the novel forwards what cultural historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls the “negative dialectic of race.” At the level of the protagonist, Shuffle’s deliberate adherence to the conventions of the classical bildungsroman but failed achievement of its aesthetic-spiritual ideal of bildung leads to a breakdown of the dialectic that would reconcile Black history and social experience with American identity and citizenship. Yet, at the level of minor characters, Shuffle is less negating racial ideologies and more forwarding a global conceptualization of race. Specifically articulated through a series of non- Black or white minor characters, Shuffle offers alternative racial subjectivities to post–civil rights US racial common sense by highlighting racialized social and historical experiences beyond and below the horizon of the US nation-state as a reminder of the alternative global geographies of race. Ultimately, the novel both negates American citizenship as sufficient to the aspirations and desires of Black political life and reorients Black political subjectivity back to what Singh calls “Black worldliness.”

Character Representation and Application Analysis of English Language and Literature Based on Neural Network

“…Shutan MI took the literary characters that appeared in the tenth grade Russian literature class as examples, such as Andrei Bolkonsky and Nikolai Rostov, to reveal the parallelism among literary characters, so as to ensure the effective cognition of student's sex [6]. Ravela took www.ijacsa.thesai.org "White Boys Shuffle" as an example to analyze the experience and growth of the protagonist in the novel, and discussed the racial ideology in the novel, believing that the novel has to some extent promoted the global conceptualization of race [7]. Rebel analyzed the works of three famous writers, and compared the content including the structure, theme, genre and ideology of the works, so as to dynamically analyze the development process of nineteenth-century literature.…”

“…In formula (7), i  represents the centroid of the i -th cluster, that is, the i B is the mean vector of all sample data in the i -th cluster, which can be calculated by formula (8).…”

If Adorno Met Intersectionality Theory: Reconceiving the Method of Negative Case Analysis

“…As such, negative dialectics can support a philosophical expansion of negative case analysis because the methods are complementary to one another; this author's interpretation of the latter is that social norms negatively affirm that which is opposed to and thus threaten the advantages conferred by overrepresented groups. Ravela's (2020) interpretation of negative dialectics helps to flesh out this author's position within the context of post-civil rights America; race represents a negative dialectic in so far as Blackness critiques and exposes the racism that grounds American citizenship, thus creating an alternative narrative. As such, this narrative brought forth by Black American civil rights activists challenged "the rule" of white supremacy in the United States and accepted "truths" about Black populations.…”

“…Inclusion criteria for research can maximize the variation in perspective and outline a breadth of experience that serves to provide context to the data that will be collected; comparisons can be made between the accounts of participants who belong to various social categories that relate to broader structural issues and rely upon the reduction of identity to perpetuate power imbalances. Ravela (2020) uses Adorno’s way of thinking to explore Blackness. This author will be inclusive of Blackness, but inclusion comes about by way of 2SLGBTQ identities, which do not operate in isolation from other intersections of identity.…”

“…As such, this narrative brought forth by Black American civil rights activists challenged “the rule” of white supremacy in the United States and accepted “truths” about Black populations. This author’s application of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1973) differs from Ravela’s (2020) in that it attempts to complicate analyses by way of the inclusion of historically underrepresented perspectives that arise from multiple and intersecting categories of identity. Inclusion criteria for research can maximize the variation in perspective and outline a breadth of experience that serves to provide context to the data that will be collected; comparisons can be made between the accounts of participants who belong to various social categories that relate to broader structural issues and rely upon the reduction of identity to perpetuate power imbalances.…”