De-constructing Racial Discourse in Edward P. Jones’ the Known World

This paper explores the discourse of race and the relations of power in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. Drawing on deconstruction, it postulates that race is a discursive construct. According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method but a critical reading activity, and the politics of deconstruction is precisely about unsettling, displacing hegemonic conceptual systems in order to effect social change. It is therefore an ideal tool for analyzing discourse, a useful practice in unfolding the contradictions and aporias, the concealed meanings and perceptions in texts.
The Known World is a meditation upon slavery and it foregrounds the conventions of slavery based on race and freedom. It exposes an ontological doubt, an ironic tension between slavery and freedom taking us to a new universe that challenges our background knowledge of the world: the black-white paradigm of race relations. Focusing on the social, historical, and political aspects of race or its discursive meanings in the novel, the purpose of this paper is to problematize race by investigating and questioning the social order or the relations of power between blacks and whites: the ambiguities and contradictions. It discusses the way social and racial categories are defined, constructed, and it also questions, complicates or subverts the static and simplistic racial poles of black and white differences.