The racechanges in
Jack Kerouac's fiction originate in racial fetishism. Kerouac's arrested
Oedipal narratives and his related myth of Native Canadian ancestry lead to
ambivalent identifications with black subjects, who exhibit characteristics
that more properly belong to Kerouac's mother. These identifications exhibit a
fetishistic play of presence and absence. Accordingly, Kerouac's racechanges
are unstable formations designed to consolidate an ethnic minority writer's
American national identity, his autochthonous link to a gendered landscape and
his volatile sexuality. When Kerouac's fiction is read in "translation,"
his joual mother-tongue dramatises a
psychosexual crisis in national belonging.