Emplotting the Past: Mari Evans, Hayden White and the Satirical-Romantic Hunt in “The Nigger Who Now Is Hunting You”

Currently, interdisciplinary studies necessitate an indispensable urge displaying how various fields stand intimately while exhibiting reciprocity within diverse disciplines. The present investigation employs Hayden White’s (۱۹۲۸-۲۰۱۸) meta-historical framework to argue that Evans’ polemical poem “The Nigger Who Now Is Hunting You” constitutes a deliberate and radical act of historical narration. Moving beyond thematic analysis, the study demonstrates how Evans strategically deploys White’s categories of emplotment and argumentation to dismantle dominant historiography and forge a plausible counter-narrative. The analysis posits that Evans synthesizes a satirical plot, portraying the oppressor’s world as absurd and doomed, with a Romantic plot --- casting the Black subject as a transcendent, heroic agent of inevitable reckoning. This hybrid employment refuses the tragic or comic modes traditionally imposed on Black historical experience, insisting instead on a narrative of immanent, transformative justice. Concurrently, the article examines the poem’s Formist argumentation which locates historical causality in the will and radically re-defined identity of the hunter, underpinned by a Mechanist logic of irreversible cause and effect. Through this meta-historical intervention, Evans does not merely document historical oppression but actively writes history as a means of collapsing past injustice, present consciousness and future retribution into a single, imperative narrative moment. This investigation positions Evans as a crucial theorist of history in her own right --- one whose poetic craft demands recognition as a form of critical historiography aimed at the annihilation of an oppressive world order and the prophetic enactment of a new one.

کلیدواژه ها:

argumentation ، Emplotment ، Hayden White ، historiography ، Mari Evans ، Signifying