美国机构化种族主义的暴力本质——解读《尼科尔少年教养院》

The Violent Nature of the Institutional Racism in the United States:A Reading of The Nickel Boys

美国著名非裔作家科尔森·怀特黑德继承并发扬了现代美国非裔文学的奴隶叙事和种族叙事传统,依据史实,以虚构的方式,在小说《尼科尔少年教养院》中描写了两个黑人少年20世纪60年代在少年教养院地狱般的悲惨经历,折射了几代黑人的集体经历和创伤性记忆。本文运用文化批评理论,借鉴解构主义思想和策略,深刻分析“教养院”式的机构化权力运行方式的虚伪性及其种族主义本质和暴力本质,揭示教养院在合法机构名义下所掩盖的对黑人实施种族暴力的种族主义本性,认为作品书写的种族主义主题具有强烈的现实意义。

The Well-known African American writer Colson Whitehead carries on the modern American literary tradition of slave narrative and race narrative by presenting two black boys' hellish experience in the Nickel Reformatory School in the 1960s during the heyday of the Jim Crow period.Based on hard facts,the story,presented as fiction,reflects the traumatic collective experience of the black people.Armed with the theories of cultural criticism and taking a deconstructive strategy,I will analyze the hypocritical and violent nature of the school as an institution so as to expose its racial crimes under the legal disguise of a school.I believe that the racial theme of the fiction has a strong reverberation with history and reality.