Brittney Winters ACF Abstract FY12
"Between Innocence and Experience: Marginalization of the 'Other' in 'On the Road"'
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900
Kerouac and the Beat generation are notorious for appropriating the language of
alienated minority subcultures as their own to describe their disillusionment with
mainstream society. Fascinated with the ways in which these minority groups
manipulated language and subverted meaning to create countercultures, Beat artists
incorporated these techniques into their own work and appointed themselves
intermediaries between these minority subcultures and the mainstream masses.
Though Beat writers contributed to the demand for representation by minority
cultures, these same narratives serve to illustrate the benefits of white privilege.
Kerouac’s protagonist in On the Road expresses his dissatisfaction with the white,
middle-class experience by fetishizing the marginalization of racial minorities during his
travels, creating in the sense of “Otherness” a type of innocence that has yet to be sullied
by the expectations of mainstream society, further reinforcing racist ideologies.
By examining On the Road through postcolonial and African-American
theoretical lenses, I will demonstrate how the language of othering serves to undermine
the protagonist’s, and by extension, Kerouac’s admiration of minority subcultures and
also demonstrates a problematic reduction of the struggles that these minorities faced in
postwar America.
Page last modified July 6, 2012
