ABSTRACT

This article argues that Colson Whitehead’s much understudied coming of age novel Sag Harbor makes an important intervention into the history of the coming of age genre. Sag Harbor is the story of upper-middle class Black boy Benji Cooper, now an adult, narrating a summer he spent at the majority Black beach town of Sag Harbor when he was fifteen years old. Through a series of extended comparative readings to canonical works of coming of age – James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993) – I argue that such narratives are often dependent on the freedom whiteness grants to move unimpeded through the world. Benji is only able to follow a ‘traditional’ coming of age narrative because his class gives him access to a space – Sag Harbor – which is not structured by an overdetermining white gaze. Thus, by aligning Benji with ‘traditional’ coming of age narratives, Whitehead intervenes in the history of Black coming of age literature, which depicts coming of age for Black youth as learning the limits of Blackness in a society built around whiteness.

摘要

本文认为，科尔森·怀特海德（Colson Whitehead）对衰老小说《萨格·哈伯》（Sag Harbor）的了解不足，对衰老类型的历史进行了重要干预。萨格港（Sag Harbor）的故事是一个中产阶级黑人男孩本吉·库珀（Benji Cooper），现已成年，讲述了他15岁时在大部分黑人海滩小镇萨格港（Sag Harbor）度过的夏天。通过一系列对成年经典著作的比较阅读-詹姆斯·鲍德温的《如果比尔街可能说话》（1974年）和杰弗里·尤金尼德斯的《处女的自杀》（1993）–我认为这样的叙述通常依赖于白人授予的自由才能不受阻碍地穿越世界。Benji只能遵循“传统”时代的叙事方式，因为他的班级使他可以进入一个空间-Sag Harbor-该空间并不是由过分确定的白眼所构成。因此，怀特海通过将本吉与“传统”的年龄叙事相结合，从而介入了黑人年龄文学的历史，该文学描绘了黑人青年的成年，因为他们在以白人为中心的社会中学习了黑人的局限性。