Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In this essay, Bily examines the narrator's sexual ambiguity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.
Most readers in the twenty-first century will see something in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man that James Weldon Johnson, the novel's author, could not: A solution to the narrator's struggles with his divided self could be in his simple refusal to be divided. In other words, if he were alive today he would not need to choose between being a "coloured man" and a "white man." He could recognize, as we do today, that our concepts of race have no basis in biology, that our concept of race is socially, not biologically, constructed. According to this way of thinking, most people are not simply "white" or "black" or "Asian,".....
This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 1,968 words. This
study guide contains 10,648 words (approx. 35 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Access Pass.
