“Everyplace is the frontier” : Convergences between Racial and Homophobic Violence in Percival Everett’s Wounded

Sammanfattning

Violence, enacted either as an instrument of power or of liberation, has represented a prime topic of scholarly attention in theoretical and literary traditions of the latter half of the 20th century, not least in African American and queer writing. This study proposes a contrastive approach to the analysis of the various episodes of violence portrayed in Percival Everett’s Wounded ([2005] 2008). Drawing upon Franz Fanon, Paolo Freire and other critical theorists, it distinguishes between three categories of violence, each with their own ramifications and underlying causes: direct, oppression-based violence against marginalized individuals, indirect violence in the form of either systemic maltreatment or individual inaction, and violence that comes in response to social injustice. In doing so, this thesis analyses how exposure to political violence represents a common denominator between the struggles experienced by members of racial minorities and queer folk despite their different histories with systems of oppression. This study seeks to indicate that charting how different forms of violence overlap with different forms of prejudice such as racism and homophobia may reveal an effective modality to resist the rapidly increasing threat of political violence encouraged by extremist views: inter-group solidarity and community-building.