기고논문 : 백인의 시혜로 얻어진 반쪽의 자유 - 흑인 노예문학과 스티븐 스필버그의 『 아미스타드 』 - = Incomplete Freedom Given by Whites : Slave Narratives and Steven Spielberg's Amistad

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

W.E.B. Du Bois`s argument in 1903 that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the relation of the darker to the lighters races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the island of the sea has predicted the emergence of racial conflicts as the central social and cultural issues of the twentieth century. Even today the racial issue is still at the core of the international and interpersonal conflicts around the world. In the American history, slavery has dominated the national discourse and consciousness and constituted the sub-text of American literature. Thus Toni Morrison poignantly argues that the contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margin of the literary imagination. In this paper I discuss the two texts on the experience of slavery; Harret Jacobs`s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a biographical novel written by a black women writer in the nineteenth century, and the film Amistad directed by Steven Speilberg, a Jewish male, in 1997. This paper brings into focus such issues as the construction of black and white identities, the struggle for freedom of black slaves, the sexual exploitation and oppression of female slaves. In particular, I examine how the two texts approach to the issue of slavery differently, resulting from the racial, sexual and historical identities of Harriet Jacobs and Steven Spielberg. A troubling aspect of the two texts is that the achievement of freedom of blacks presented in the texts is portrayed as something given by whites. In Jacobs`s narrative, Linda`s final freedom has to be bought by her benevolent white employer, Mrs. Bruce. Seeing the bill of sale, Linda is sarcastic about the fact that women were the articles of traffic in the free city of New York. In the film Amistad, the process of struggles of blacks toward freedom seems to be reduced as blacks are removed from the center of the stories while establishing whites as the benevolent and heroic figures in this battle for freedom. As a result, the deep-rooted racial superiority of whites is never critically analyzed, and historical repentance for the part of whites which is due to black is never presented as the important issue in the film. In spite of this shortcomings, this film shows through visual images the importance of memory and ancestors in the construction of black identities, the motherhood of slave women, the power of language, which become recurringly the important subject matters of African American literature. Since Koreans are not acutely aware of or sensitive to racial discrimination and oppression, and our knowledge of slavery is fragmentary, these two texts can be a very useful preparatory readings toward the deep understanding of African American history and literature.