Name Play in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Novels

Abstract

Much criticism has addressed the linguistic code-switching of Walter Mosley’s protagonist Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Other criticism has explored the major African American literary tradition in which characters quest for true or authentic names. This article shows that code-switching and the social (especially the socio-linguistic) demands that make code-switching necessary and effective are at odds with the possibility of a single, true, authentic name that signifies a person who bears it. Beginning with an analysis of a long debate over descriptivist and antidescriptivist conceptions of naming–a debate that has crucial political, social, and broadly ideological implications–the article argues that over the course of sixteen Easy Rawlins novels, Mosley reveals a necessary gap between name and person, a gap that at once exposes the radical contingency of naming and still allows for political and social effects of naming on identity.