Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Race issues and reconciliation are also prominent in the following essay, where Ineke Bockting elaborates a persuasive argument around the table of brotherhood, which traces the evolution of the American Dream as perceived by different southern writers in their autobiographical narratives. Using Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dream of race integration as a starting point for her discussion, Bockting turns to C. Vann Woodward’s postulates in The Burden of Southern History to offer an overview of “the American founding myths that form the background of the American Dream, [and] against which the South stands out as if it were a foreign nation.” According to Bockting, King’s dream of brotherhood, materialized in “the powerful visual, olfactory and gustatory imagery of the dinner table,” depended precisely on the possibility of bringing these myths to the South. But the obstacles that the dream of a dinner table of brotherhood had to overcome in the South were too many and too deep, as evinced in Malcolm X’s response to King in “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and as further reflected in the autobiographical experiences recorded by writers and activists. Bockting traces references to those experiences in the life narratives of William Alexander Percy, Langston Hughes, Lillian Smith, Anne Moody and Marita Golden. Images of food and dinner tables figure prominently in some of these works, as Bockting shows, but mostly as a realistic counterpoint to King’s dream which seems to end up in fatalistic disillusionment. Bockting also comments on the Obama administration, as the first African American US President in history, in relation to the Dream “of a family dinner table of brotherhood” and harmony.