Crossdressing Nuns and Hotheaded Mice : Navigating Hard-Boiled Trickster Behavior in Chester B. Himes' A Rage in Harlem and Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | As creatures commonly appearing in folktales and mythical stories, tricksters are characterized by unpredictable, amoral and shapeshifting behavior and crossing boundaries of worlds which should be kept apart. In hard-boiled school of detection, originating in the United States in the 1920s as a sub-genre of crime fiction, appearance of tricksters has been linked to violent murders, corrupt crimes, drug abuse and overall moral decay of society. Their characteristic features adapt to the dire portrayal of American reality, through which hard-boiled authors criticize corruption of government officials and the police. While tricksters are not heroes or villains by rule, such classification gets blurred further in the hard-boiled environment where all society is infected and neither the detectives themselves should be viewed as the heroes of the story. Hence, hard-boiled tricksters are even more difficult to detect as they remain on the sidelines, interjecting for their own benefit. As African American authors of hard-boiled fiction, Chester B. Himes and Walter Mosley challenge these notions further by having their Black characters deal with overt systemic racism and consequent internalization of racial prejudices. With wider societal implications and through their trickster characters, Himes and Mosley offer an insight into identification of Black hard-boiled tricksters and how these tricksters’ aims may deviate from tricksters from traditional folktales. |
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