Stereotypes in Edward Paul Jones's The Known World

Edward Paul Jones, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Known World and receiver of PEN/Hemingway Award for his first book Lost in the City, is an African American postmodern writer. Jones questions the enduring stereotypes and stereotypical discourses on black people in terms of the cultivation of values and teaching-learning policies in his novel that is a locus where we can have a different picture of African American people who have been stereotypically represented in the literary contexts. Thus, black identity for Jones is not what has been previously made and shaped but something which is unique and distinct. For him, it is not only the white community that should be criticized but also blacks are to be held as responsible in their relation to whites. Though Jones tries to be unbiased in his representation of the black community, his neo-slave narrative represents a location wherein we encounter some possibilities that the so-called truthful documentation, history, does not allow us to encounter. Influenced by the discussions in postmodernism, Jones questions history, racial, cultural and educational stereotypes on blacks, white oppression, and black conformity. But the point is that he makes blacks as both subject and object of representation rather than the ones who are the fillers of the gaps of the text.

Keywords:

Cultural Studies , Edward Paul Jones , Neo-slave Narrative , Postmodern , Stereotype