The Melting Pot That Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua Franca of Jack Kerouacs Fiction

The racechanges in Jack Kerouacʹs fiction originate in racial fetishism. Kerouacʹs arrested Oedipal narratives and his related myth of Native Canadian ancestry lead to ambivalent identifications with black subjects, who exhibit characteristics that more properly belong to Kerouacʹs mother. These identifications exhibit a fetishistic play of presence and absence. Accordingly, Kerouacʹs racechanges are unstable formations designed to consolidate an ethnic minority writerʹs American national identity, his autochthonous link to a gendered landscape and his volatile sexuality. When Kerouacʹs fiction is read in "translation," his joual mother-tongue dramatises a psychosexual crisis in national belonging.