Identity Through Cultural Multiplicity as Reflected in Middle Passage

Abstract

Charles Johnson’s novel Middle Passage includes the forms of identity and culture by disclosing differences and dualism and displays a basic spiritual set up in the African and American cultural legacy. Johnson provides the crossroads of consciousness and experience, the history of identity as a “middle” experience of the African American. He treats Middle Passage as the source of a refugee from the unknown roots bringing the subject to the marginalization of identity crisis in a mixed culture. The “middle” passage can be seen as the ontological and epistemological material that gets locked out of binary oppositions and dualism, or the matter of experience and consciousness, which could also be the definition of “identity” as depicted in the novel. The novel emphasizes racial identity as a process that makes comment on the culture that encircles it. Thus, in the analysis of the novel from the cultural perspective, it is required to consider the cultural opposition, not wholly on the other, but settled down into cultural multiplicity and versatility. The problem of identity is a focus in the novel; yet, it is left complicated. In this perspective, the study attempts to investigate identity within relevant culture through crossroads in response to, against and across the parameters of gender, race, history and social rank.