《牛群的宰杀》中的身体叙事与瘟疫书写

Body Narrative and Plague Writing in The Cattle Killing

约翰·怀德曼的小说《牛群的宰杀》对1793年费城爆发的黄热病进行了书写,讲述了人们尤其是非裔美国人与之展开的抗争。在与瘟疫的斗争中,人的身体不仅是一种物理上的疾病载体,而且是一种象征性的符号表征,显示社会的意识形态和种族关系。怀德曼驳斥了白人强加于"无差别"物理性身体上的疾病谎言,揭示了非裔身体作为客体被规训为抗击瘟疫工具的事实,并披露了非裔被言说为他者的行径。通过揭示瘟疫期间种族不平等现象,作者抨击了种族观念以及衍生而来的矛盾与歧视,这对于了解当下美国的社会状况具有重要的现实意义。

In The Cattle Killing, John Wideman writes about the yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793, narrating people’s, especially African-Americans’ fight against it. In the fight against the plague, the human body became not only a physical carrier of illness, but also a symbolic sign through which social ideology and racial relations were represented. Wideman refutes the lie that the disease was imposed on an "indiscriminate"physical body by white Americans, and reveals that the African-American body as an object was trained as a tool to combat the plague, and uncovers the arbitrary and artificial construction through which African-Americans were defined as the Other. By exposing racial inequality during the plague, Wideman attacks the idea of race and some contradictions and discriminations deriving from it, which sheds light on the present American social conditions.