The creation of an Alternative Subjectivity in Walter Mosley's Detective Novels.

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the work of Walter Mosley. This reappropriates the detective conventions to represent the American society of the 1950s and 1960s from an African American perspective. He creates a black private eye, Easy Rawlins, whose profile mirrors that of his white counterparts but also subverts it. This thesis studies Raymond Chandler's canonical work "The Simple Art of Murder" and establish those traits that characterize Easy Rawlins. Likewise, it compares Mosley and Chester Himes' black detective heroes and highlights the traits that they have in common. Secondly, focusing on the perspective on identity, consciousness, and subjectivity of black scholars such as Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois, along with the post-colonial approach of critics such as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, Robert Young, and Homi Bhabha among others, it provides the necessary concepts to discuss Easy's profile from a post-colonial angle. Easy Rawlins' gradual formation of identity throughout the ten novels can be analyzed from when he is nineteen in Gone Fishin' (1997) until he is forty six years old in Cinnamon Kiss (2005). Evidently, his development is affected by the different personal situations he has to go through, and the historical time that he happens to live as a black man through the 50s and the 60s. The subject is culturally and socially constructed, and Easy is no exception. Although cultural codes are shared and human beings live together, every individual is an independent self with a unique perspective and a single first-person ontology. In Easy's case, this thesis argues that there are three main aspects that shape the character's subjectivity: his role as a detective, his post-colonial consciousness as a black man raised in a society dominated by whites, and finally, his attachment and defense of a strong African American culture.