Abstract Book of the 9th International Academic Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2025
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Narrative Emotion and Racial Identity in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor: A Cognitive Narratological Approach
Dr. Jaya Shrivastava
ABSTRACT:
This paper explores the narrative representation of emotion and racial identity in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009), a novel that captures the nuanced experiences of African American adolescence in a so-called “post-race” America. Through the perspective of Benji, a black teenage protagonist navigating predominantly white social spaces, Whitehead constructs a complex emotional landscape shaped by both internal aspirations and external racial codes. Grounded in cognitive narratology, this study investigates how narrative structures elicit and encode emotion in response to racial stereotypes, offering insight into the construction of fictional consciousness in a racially stratified society.
Drawing on theoretical frameworks proposed by Patrick Colm Hogan, Suzanne Keen, Keith Oatley, and Alan Palmer, the paper foregrounds emotion as a pivotal element in literary engagement. Hogan’s assertion that literature reflects culturally specific emotional models provides a foundation for analyzing Benji’s affective responses as shaped by and resisting dominant racial narratives. Keen and Oatley’s emphasis on reader empathy and identification informs an investigation into how narrative emotion invites readers to inhabit Benji’s worldview. Palmer’s concept of “fictional minds” further illuminates how emotions are not only depicted but structurally embedded within character cognition.
Methodologically, the study applies close textual analysis informed by cognitive literary theory to trace how emotional cues—such as shame, aspiration, and alienation—mediate Benji’s evolving selfhood. It demonstrates that Whitehead’s narrative does not merely reflect emotion but actively constructs it as a site of racial critique and cultural negotiation.
By integrating cognitive science and literary analysis, this paper contributes to the growing field of interdisciplinary narratology and underscores the critical potential of emotions in reimagining African American identity in contemporary fiction. The study affirms that narratives like Sag Harbor do not simply represent post-black experience—they emotionally and cognitively reshape our understanding of it.
Keywords: Cognitive Narratology, Narrative Emotion, Post-Black Literature, Colson Whitehead