Becoming Richard Wright: Space and the WPA

Abstract

The national, international, and transnational spaces ever apparent in Richard Wright’s search for a space to be a black man in the twentieth century are touchstones for the consideration of the intersection between race and place manifested in the power struggle that he undertook to create a mature, masculine subjectivity in times both of decreasing economic and class resources and of challenging social and regional locations that functioned to diminish the possibilities for individual self-awareness, racial actualization, and social agency. The physical and psychological space associated with the South/North axis and with the liberatory northern migration is typically figured as central to Wright’s becoming a writer and his development as a writer; however, one aspect of his early years in Chicago and New York has received noticeably less attention. Wright’s own drive to find a space not simply for an expressive black masculinity but for becoming a modern writer finds a counter-drive in the formation of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to foster and employ writers during the Great Depression. The Writers’ Project became a way for Wright and other black writers to imagine their own lives as professionals, as practitioners of a vocation, despite their dislocation from the South and concomitant dispersal throughout the national landscape and the foreign places more hospitable to racialized subjects.KeywordsNegro StudyBlack MetropolisRacial ActualizationNegro LifeYork Public LibraryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.