For my paper I am going to be writing about the interaction of labels that are traditionally ascribed to people in the United States. In particular, I have chosen to focus on the labeled race and class of the characters in some of the books that we have read this semester. Of course, most of the characters that we have read this semester are considered black, so my paper will focus on the difference in experience for the “poor” and the “rich” black characters that we have read. For that reason, Hugh from The Expendable Man is going to be a pivotal character for me as he is really the only upper class black man that we get to know well in our books. Moreover, he is written by a white woman, which as we discussed can complicate whether or not the experience of the character can be considered even remotely authentic.
As I have begun to draft my paper, I think this has been the biggest point of consternation: how applicable are the experience of Hugh to that of upper class black men? How about King David’s experience for the poor black man? While my original thesis was that I would widely apply their experiences to the black experience, I have realized that this is mistaken, and that instead it is best to analyze the chosen characters’ experiences to determine what part of the upper or lower class black experience might be like while acknowledging that no character from a fantasy novel can perfectly encapsulate it. Essentially, the labels that I refer to in the title are too nondescript, yet in America we often feel like we know everything we need to know about that person when we know their race, class, and gender.
A final point that I have thought about as I am writing my drafts is that I do not feel that I have had the opportunity to consider the third label that I mentioned above: gender. By the nature of noir, women are certainly not given center stage, and it makes it difficult to compare the women to the men because they simply serve different roles in the genre. I briefly considered trying to do it, but it feels as if I would then be comparing apples to oranges because the fictional characters are not meant to serve the same roles within the novels; with such established roles in noir, it seems useless to simply explain a well-known paradigm.
I agree that we often get sucked into blanketing groups with whatever limited knowledge we have of them. I admire your effort to distinguish this, and I think it will be interesting to look at the parts of black life that these characters emphasize and why that emphasis is important. Good luck!
I love what you are going to be writing about for your paper. I think it is a unique angle that would give more depth to what we have been learning about in class. I also like how you are acknowledging some of the faults that your paper might have like what you said about gender. Keep up the good work I know that your paper will be great!