Funhouse Infinity Mirror: Simulacral Reflections on Injun Joe
Location
Golden Eagles
Start Date
28-4-2023 9:20 AM
Department
English
Abstract
How does Mark Twain’s stereotypical characterization of Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) reflect the dominant nineteenth-century cultural attitudes regarding Native Americans? Modeled after Toni Morrison’s framework on the constructed American Africanist presence in U.S. national literature, this project will aim to explore the query of focus by examining the secondary literature currently available on Mark Twain’s distortion of Native Americans, as well as providing original analysis. Often overlooked in literary circles in favor of its critically acclaimed sequel, Tom Sawyer is itself a compelling, allegorical case-study containing valuable insights into how the dominant cultural ideology of nineteenth-century America displaced its combined racial and moral anxieties on the figmental construction/ repression of the racialized “other” as embodied in the novel’s central villain. The worldbuilding of Tom Sawyer being the stuff of (white) boyhood fantasy ultimately allows for the conjuring of a mythical creature of demonic proportions: that infamous “half-breed devil” Injun Joe. There is a palpable cognitive dissonance found in the novel’s central plot hinging on the rupture of material violence while its explicitly intended audience caters to the youth demographic. This unconscious internal conflict is a pattern found throughout the text, emblematic of Twain’s paranoid displacement of national responsibility to Native Americans, as projected onto his revelatory caricature of Injun Joe.
Faculty Sponsor
Timothy Scherman, Northeastern Illinois University
Funhouse Infinity Mirror: Simulacral Reflections on Injun Joe
Golden Eagles
How does Mark Twain’s stereotypical characterization of Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) reflect the dominant nineteenth-century cultural attitudes regarding Native Americans? Modeled after Toni Morrison’s framework on the constructed American Africanist presence in U.S. national literature, this project will aim to explore the query of focus by examining the secondary literature currently available on Mark Twain’s distortion of Native Americans, as well as providing original analysis. Often overlooked in literary circles in favor of its critically acclaimed sequel, Tom Sawyer is itself a compelling, allegorical case-study containing valuable insights into how the dominant cultural ideology of nineteenth-century America displaced its combined racial and moral anxieties on the figmental construction/ repression of the racialized “other” as embodied in the novel’s central villain. The worldbuilding of Tom Sawyer being the stuff of (white) boyhood fantasy ultimately allows for the conjuring of a mythical creature of demonic proportions: that infamous “half-breed devil” Injun Joe. There is a palpable cognitive dissonance found in the novel’s central plot hinging on the rupture of material violence while its explicitly intended audience caters to the youth demographic. This unconscious internal conflict is a pattern found throughout the text, emblematic of Twain’s paranoid displacement of national responsibility to Native Americans, as projected onto his revelatory caricature of Injun Joe.