트럼프의 ‘위대한 미국’과 조지 플로이드 사건을 읽는 하나의 방법: 『로빈슨 크루소』의 섭리론과 식민주의

Abstract

The former U. S. President Donald Trump’s well-known motto, “Make America Great Again,” while invoking the authority of America’s Manifest Destiny, works as a rallying cry for American Exceptionalism. With such conservative nationalism, Trump poses himself as a bastion of Christianity and law, whose rightful enforcement is exemplified by the brutal military suppression of the Black Lives Matter Movement nationwide. To trace back to the origin of how Trump’s Evangelical rhetoric serves to legitimize American Exceptionalism and institutionalized racism, this paper revisits one of the eighteenth-century Protestant spiritual autobiographies and overseas colonial adventure stories, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Just as Trump turns to the Evangelical mission for the jingoistic self-definition of who Americans are, Defoe’s classical work reappropriates Protestant Providentialism in order to flesh out England’s nascent imperial ideals. Trump’s exceptionalism resuscitates the America’s by masquerading it as the accepted norms of American democracy. In a very similar vein, Defoe’s narrator deviates from the conventional structure of tensions intrinsic to Spiritual Autobiography and Early Modern adventure narratives, the conflicts between free will and God’s ways, original sin and redemption, colonialism and cannibalistic threat. Crusoe ultimately tilts the balance in favor of his egocentric construal of Providence and unabashedly cracks the mysteries of divine will in order to justify his imperial desire and British Exceptionalism. Crucial to Crusoe’s egoistic turn, this paper argues, is the role of Friday, whose voluntary and willing embracement of Crusoe’s cultural imperialism frees the protagonist from the ethical burdens of such a unilateral exceptionalism.