This Country, Where Many Things Are Strange and Hard to Understand: Booker T. Washington in Sicily

The Man Farthest Down (1912), which narrates the 1910 visit to Europe of the prominent African American leader Booker T. Washington, includes an important section on Sicily. The book compares social conditions and processes of uplift in Europe with the United States. Within this framework Washington’s representation of Sicily and the Sicilians fulfills several purposes. Sicilians firstly appear as a negative counter-image of the African Americans in the United States South, worse off than the latter because of the “traditionalism” of its population, its instrumental religion and lack of morality. At a second level of his narrative Washington deploys Sicily as a case to deconstruct stereotyped representations both of Sicilians and of African Americans, while comparisons between Sicily and the United States also provide covert critiques of social conditions of African Americans. At a third level, Washington also observes how the poverty of Sicilians results from the neglect and oppression of authorities, revealing the fragility (indirectly also for the African American community in the United States) of his own master narrative of uplift through education and the acquisition of labour ethics.

Trefwoorden:Booker T. Washington, Sicily