For my final project, I would like to expand my second Medium Wiki entry and continue to look at the way other characters in Light in August define Joe Christmas’s race as they see fit. As a point of departure, I will respond to critic Avak Hasratian’s claim that, “A categorical crisis follows the accusation that Christmas kills a white woman, as other characters in the novel try and fail to define him as black” (63). He understands the community’s frustration with Christmas’ ambiguous racial behavior as evidence of its inability to categorize the protagonist (Hasratian 79). To support his claim, Hasratian refers to the following textual moment: “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad” (LIA 350). I would like to press against Hasratian’s argument by offering and examining evidence of the way that the protagonist’s “parchmentcolored” features and his racially ambiguous behavior revealed in the statement “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man” allow him to be anything to anyone in the text. As evidence of this, I intend to examine various instances in which other characters supply definitions of Christmas’ racial being which function to explain him or serve a specific purpose. For instance, Joanna Burden construes Christmas’s being ways which allow him to fulfill various personas for her. He can be a clandestine Negro lover as well as a potential college educated race leader. On the other hand, to some of the work’s African American characters, Christmas’ looks and behavior indicate that he is a white man. For example, the black man interviewed by the sheriff points to rumors about Christmas’ light-skinned appearance and cohabitation with another white man to conclude that he is a white. Interestingly, the African American parishioners at the revival meeting seeing that Christmas is “white” and that his face is “not black” thereby determine that he is “Satan himself” (LIA 322). Finally, to the white community, Christmas is “That nigger murderer” (LIA 346). Upon learning of Christmas’ supposed African American ancestry, this community immediately sees the murder case in light of race and takes every opportunity to demonize Christmas as the black murderer of a white woman. Taking the abovementioned accounts of this character’s race under consideration, I propose to extend my analysis to look at how the various community groups’ assessments of Christmas lead to his multiple subject formations. I would argue that the competing definitions of the protagonist reveal how it is possible for an individual to maintain multiple social identities which are contingent upon the group defining him. Such definitions become functional classifications for the many community elements that come into contact with the protagonist since they allow the community to construct a particular understanding of the individual based on his racial assignment. By looking at examples that demonstrate how community elements successfully categorize Christmas, I hope to further explore the way that his multiple subject formations develop.

Hasratian, Avak. “The Death of Difference in Light in August.” Criticism, 49.1, 2007, pp. 55-84.