Race-ing Hemingway: Revisions of Masculinity and/as Whiteness in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro

This article explores the interplay between gender and race in two of Hemingway’s autobiographical works on Africa: Green Hills of Africa (1935) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005). Unlike most existing scholarship, which has focused on his fictional representations of sexual and racial difference, the article concentrates on Hemingway’s own gendered and racialized views as the white male author-persona of these autobiographical texts. Linking masculinity and whiteness, the paper shows how Hemingway’s masculinist pose, which hardened through the 1930s, may be connected to his racist attitudes in Green Hills of Africa. Similarly, his more “relaxed” masculinity of the 1950s will be related to his changed racial views in Under Kilimanjaro, wherein he adopts surprisingly progressive views on both women and blacks.