![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Erecting a feminine monument to emblematize and materialize highly abstract notions like nationhood, justice, peace, warfare, virtue, democracy, pro/creativity, and truth has a long history in many cultures across the globe. This cross-gendering of the racial imaginary, introjecting a male vision of racial collectivity and history through a female’s frame of reference, though not exactly a form of cross-dressing, can be usefully analyzed as such. When Ernest Gaines chooses a woman as the individual subject for collective memorialization and the ideal medium of racial memory in his 1971 novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he participates in a significant but overlooked genre of black masculine discourse, the composition of black authorship as historical/national authority through the voice and viewpoint of a female protagonist. ![]()
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