Michele Mendelssohn's essay on "Reconsidering Race, Language and Identity in "The Emperor Jones"" attempts to revise and question the commonly used interpretative techniques like German expressionism, Jungian Psychology, racial memory etc to analyze O’Neill’s one of the major works, “The Emperor Jones”.  Michele carefully dissects the play exposing  the multiple layers of meanings, which O’Neill constructs by his witty interplay of themes like race, language and identity.

 The essay  has heavily borrowed its references from the works of  Franz Fanon, Bhabha and other scholars, providing factual support to Michele's arguement.Through Fanon's racially-defined psychoanalytic theory , she makes her primary point sugessting why and how Jones shares a common racial history and also throws light upon the psychoexistential complex created by the juxtaposition of black and white races. In further talking about the role of race in shaping language and identity, the play's mistaken analysis of the one dealing with the question of race, is corrected by Fanon; "The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, in jungle" .Further by internalising the  language of the colonizer, Jones had become intellectually colonised.Thus by saying “…mastery of language affords remarkable power”, Fanon justifies Jones establishing himself as the Emperor , which Smithers fails to accomplish. This argument holds much value in context like a pre-colonial India where Vernacular languages  were encouraged among British officers and administrators. One can fathom the obvious reasons behind doing so. Jones bilingualism forces him to bear a double burden under which his sense of self crumbles, which is termed as "Manichean delirium" by Fanon . Michele makes this argument to project a post -colonial individual , who embodies both colonizer and the colonized. Jones takes up a “negroid” form, whom Fanon calls a “ white man’s artifice inscribed on a black man’s body”. Jones atavistic experience is treated in a different light where he faces a rapproachment between terms. Jones emphasizes rationality, being antithetical to irrational “heathen” natives. But later uses “nigger”, a term reserved for Other, while telling himself “Cheah up, nigger, de worst is yet to come!” With these lines the contrast starts fading here. Both Michele and Fanon seem to convince their readers with this final argument where Fanon makes the readers aware of the shortcomings of Jung’s theory, explaining how Jones genetically share collective unconscious of a black man while culturally assimilating the collective unconscious of a white man’s fear and hatred of blackness.

The original play “ The Emperor Jones” was in set in early 20^th C, in the wake of the upcoming Civil Rights Movement. The black community had suffered a painful racial past of slavery, impugn, violence, hatred and  segregation for more than two centuries which , with Civil Rights Movement , saw a future to itself.  Racism thus forms the core theme of the play and language and identity development of the characters is branched from the same. The essay successfully demolishes the idea that black and white are separable. It captures the deeper connotations of the play ,exploring these inseparable, painfully permeable boundaries between black and white.As the great philosopher Neitzche propounds in his book "Beyond Good and Evil", discrete polarities cease to exist; good and bad, black and white, truth and lie are all relative. It’s the “grey” which remains.