Native Son Research Articles

Frankenstein in the History of Happiness: From Ancient Ethics to Richard Wright

ABSTRACT In the classical and neo-classical philosophical tradition, virtue is necessary, or even sufficient, for happiness; it partially or fully constitutes happiness. Virtue comes first; happiness attends it. In Frankenstein, however, Shelley’s creature thinks of happiness as a social and material entitlement, and, turning classical philosophy on its head, a prerequisite to virtue. ‘I was benevolent and good,’ the creature says to his creator, ‘misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.’ Happiness, to the creature’s mind, is not available to the lone, superior individual as an assertion of his own rational independence; it is, rather, dependent on circumstance and our needs as fundamentally social creatures. Shelley’s moral and psychological inquiry into virtue and happiness emerges from political-philosophical responses to the French Revolution, chiefly those by her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The ethical question explored in Frankenstein continue to animate nineteenth-century realist and naturalist novels. Developing the case for Shelley’s direct influence on African-American literary naturalism of the first half of the twentieth century, I conclude with a consideration of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which examines the genesis of and responsibility for another moral monster, Bigger Thomas.

Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan by Aksana Ismailbekova

Reviewed by: Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan by Aksana Ismailbekova Fengfeng Zhang (bio) and Laiyi Zhang (bio) Aksana Ismailbekova, Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 219 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-02539-5. Born in Bishkek and trained in Germany, the anthropologist Aksana Ismailbekova studies the transition of Kyrgyzstan from a Soviet Republic to an independent nation-state using a case study of one village in Northern Kyrgyzstan. She uses her ethnographic observations of the intrinsic connection between kinship relations and political patronage to argue that clan politics help sustain rather than undermine democracy in Central Asia. In the course of fourteen months in 2006 and 2007, Ismailbekova observed daily life in the village of Bulak in Chüi Province, conducted interviews with its inhabitants, and participated in their activities. Her study focuses on the rise and fall of a local politician and businessman, Rahim, a "native son" of Bulak raised in Bishkek, who manipulated the ties of kinship and patronage to fulfill his political ambitions at the local level and throughout northern [End Page 304] Kyrgyzstan. Ismailbekova argues that Rahim's strategy was typical of many other Kyrgyz politicians, which made his case paradigmatic for the development of democratic politics in Kyrgyzstan. The book consists of an introduction, seven chapters, and "Concluding Words". The introduction presents the setting of the story and conceptual frameworks used for its interpretation. Chapter 1 discusses the structures of kinship and patronage in Kyrgyz society from the pre-Soviet era to the post-Soviet period. Chapter 2 charts Rahim's place on the genealogical map of local society in Bulak and beyond. Chapter 3 explains the categories of kinship and the operation of patronage networks and kinship practices in the village. Chapter 4 discusses the concept of the "circle of trust" supported by patronage networks, using the example of Rahim's private farm Emgek. Writing about negotiations on the building of a mosque in the village of Orlovka, in chapter 5, the author explicates the link between patronage networks and state structures. Rahim's election to the Kyrgyz parliament from the local election district highlights his return "as a native son" of Bulak. This part of the story is told in chapter 6, which also deconstructs the symbolism of election day to demonstrate how democracy functions in rural Kyrgyzstan and what it really means to ordinary Kyrgyz. Chapter 7 presents Rahim's victory feast as a celebration not only of his election success but also of the power of traditional social ties. The concluding section of the book mentions Rahim's death and the subsequent collapse of patronage networks. The author offers her interpretation of the political meaning of patronage in the modern world and criticizes the normative Western concept of democracy as incompatible with clientelism and tribalism. Ismailbekova speaks of informal social networks in terms of "social poetics": they are omnipresent and deeply ingrained in the society but not formally institutionalized and need to be explicated by a scholar as both violating and adhering to the official norms. Historically, Kyrgyz tribes were organized along common genealogies and hierarchies, and knowledge of family lineage was transmitted through sanjyra (oral genealogical legends). The lineage was organized according to patrilineal descent. Patron–client relations were established between clan leaders (bii or manap) and the poor, but they were not necessarily blood-based. During Soviet times, kinship and patronage networks survived, even if somewhat modified, as many lineage groups were integrated into the kolkhoz structures. The post-1991 period witnessed the revival of interest in genealogies at the private [End Page 305] and state levels, as the foundation for rewriting the country's official history and promoting national culture. The historic rivalry among different lineages in the north and south of the country contributed in part to the escalation of political tensions that brought about the Revolutions of 2005 and 2010. It is against this historical background that the author identifies Rahim's position in the structures of kinship in Bulak village. She argues that Rahim was integrated into the segmentary lineage system (which implies a combination of...

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s by Milton A. Cohen

Reviewed by: The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s by Milton A. Cohen Kevin R. West The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. U of Missouri P, 2018, 382 pp. Hardcover $44.00. In this well-researched study, Milton Cohen documents the shifting political attitudes of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway throughout the 1930s and early 1940s with an eye toward mapping the factors that led each author to move toward and then away from an identifiably leftist praxis. Cohen combines biographical and epistolary evidence with a reading of each author’s major novel of the period—The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, respectively—to investigate how the authors found invigorating paradigms in collectivist commitments for literary production and social critique as well as irreconcilable contradictions. According to Cohen, each author’s attraction to leftist ideology was a product primarily of self-interest and concern for topical issues as opposed to a more general commitment to socialist or communist values—although Wright was a member of the Communist Party for several years and all three authors contributed to left-leaning publications (Hemingway’s 1935 article “Who Murdered the Vets?” in The New Masses likely being the key publication for Hemingway Review [End Page 111] readers, with the keynote address at the 1937 League of American Writers Congress as an important follow-up performance). Despite clear sympathies with the disenfranchised members of various societies, all three novelists qua novelists necessarily found their strong individualism in conflict with collectivist demands, an internal tension that Cohen sees mirrored in the protagonists of each of the three novels. In the case of Wright, the failure of the Communist Party of America to explicitly oppose racism—or its insistence that race was a subset of class and not the proper focus of revolutionary energies—led to his dramatic and explicit ouster from the Party. Native Son’s protagonist Bigger Thomas may be decidedly unsympathetic, Cohen avers, but the racism he experiences at least partially causes his criminality, and Wright as an African-American writer eventually came to see that the struggle for racial equality could no longer remain subordinate to some supposedly larger struggle for economic revolution. Or, rather, as Cohen determines from his close reading of the novel’s final pages, the communist vision (as expressed by Bigger’s lawyer Max) is not in fact sufficiently large for Wright: in his crucial essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright reports how he came to see that the human right to self-determination exceeded politics and race. Cohen, along with Keneth Kinnamon, sees the tension between Max and Bigger at the novel’s end as reflective of Wright’s vacillation between the misaligned (though not mutually exclusive) goals of communism and civil rights. Likewise, Cohen finds the “central contradiction” of The Grapes of Wrath to be the lack of coherence between the “rugged individualism of the pioneering farmers” and the collective action required to challenge the powers arrayed against them (181). Cohen incisively notes the Joads’ blindness to their ancestors’ appropriation of Native American lands even as they experience the appropriation of their own lands and labor; surely they ought to see that group solidarity must supersede clan solidarity, but the novel’s early, strident, “collective ‘we’ . . . seems to shrivel to the familial ‘we’ of the Joads in the final chapters” (207). The novel’s mixed messages as to what constitutes ownership and what drove the Joads from “their” land—the weather, the capitalists, or the tractors—serve to index Steinbeck’s inability to synthesize his interest in “people not classes” and his conviction that “the principle of private ownership as a means of production is not long with us” (205). Even if Steinbeck did not consider himself a communist, Cohen rightly observes that his anti-capitalism certainly sounds communist, even as he lacked clear ideas about what would [End Page 112] replace private ownership. “Just as the novel’s contradictions reflect an author blinded by his passionate partisanship,” Cohen concludes, “its failure to show the ‘we’ coalescing politically hints...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Eero Laine As 2020 tips over into 2021 we have a lot to consider about the state of theatre and performance. In light of recent news and political transitions, it seems that the new year might bring the possibility of attending theatre in an actual theatre. Something resembling life from a year ago could be back on the horizon, even as it is difficult to say when we might again be packed into a crowded theatre sitting elbow to elbow, knees to the back of seats. In any case, the barometer of theatre will tell us a lot about how we're all doing. And the pandemic is just one part of the equation. Since the last issue of JDTC was published, there have been many calls to reconsider what any return to theatre practice might bring without simply turning back the clock. Indeed, one must think through such matters alongside the pronounced disparities heightened and highlighted by COVID-19, global movements in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality and murder, shifts in household and other labor responsibilities, expectations, and requirements, pressing questions about finances and budgets, to say nothing of the ways that various technologies have impacted and altered daily routines and ways of interacting and working. There is no business-as-usual right now in theatre, so it might be time to seriously reconsider what theatre might be in the future. In this issue we find theatre that seeks to alter the world and the ways we experience it, methods of considering artists' lives in various, sometimes distressed, relations to their work, as well as critical examinations of the incursions of the stage into the world and vice versa. For many of the authors in this issue, violence—both staged and systemic—is a theoretical portal into and through these larger questions. Together, these authors are grappling with difficult, often unanswerable questions, and the articles in this issue exemplify the kind of outward-looking critical and theoretical reading that JDTC affords. Reading across the work here, we see the importance of social, political, economic, and personal contexts. Indeed, we see that those categories are intricately linked and enmeshed, and that they coincide in plots, characters, staging decisions, and the communities that engage and create these theatrical objects of study. It wasn't planned this way, but every article in this issue closely considers a particular playwright or production. The lead article, Gwendolyn Alker's "Fornesian Animality: María Irene Fornés's Challenge to a Politics of Identity," revisits the work of Fornés, troubling assumptions and working against polite readings of complex and uneasy work. Isaiah Matthew Wooden reminds us of the deep importance of theatrical production, not only for our discipline of theatre, but for broader matters of public and political discourse. In "How Bigger Was Born Anew: Adaptation, Refiguration, and Double Consciousness in Nambi E. Kelley's Native Son,'" Wooden illustrates the ways that theatre can engage and stage work from other artistic forms, generating new understandings and intervening in longstanding theoretical debates. Danielle Drees's article "Burnout Dramaturgy: Revaluing Sleep [End Page 7] in Caryl Churchill's Sleepless Plays" introduces a form of social dramaturgy that considers how and when and why characters sleep (or don't). With attention to labor and the circumstances of burnout, Drees theorizes a particularly pertinent condition of contemporary life both on and off the stage. Andrew Kimbrough's "Disability, Sentiment, and the Capabilities Approach: Amy Herzog's Mary Jane" offers important considerations of disability and caregiving in and through theatre. The article rereads Herzog's Mary Jane, inverting many of the assumptions in reviews and audience response from a focus on empathy for personal suffering to a more systemic critique. Ryan Poll's "Lynn Nottage's Theatre of Genocide: Ruined, Rape, and Afropessimism," thinks dialectically through global antiblackness and the cruelties of capitalism. Poll opens conversations about the ways that atrocity is represented, staged, and otherwise made visible, amongst totalizing violences that emerge historically and in the present. Peter Yang's "Postmodern Violent Conditions in Loher's Innocence" confronts the critical response to Dea Loher's work and the ways that it...

Walter Benjamin, Advertising, and the Utopian Moment in Modernist Literature

Walter Benjamin, Advertising, and the Utopian Moment in Modernist Literature Ben Moore (bio) In a well-known entry in Convolute G of the Arcades Project (“Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville”), Walter Benjamin describes the violent impression made upon him many years before by an advertisement for Bullrich Salz seen on a streetcar in Berlin, as well as his loss of memory of all details of this advert and their sudden return in full force upon seeing a sign bearing the words “Bullrich Salz” in the window of a “miserable café” in the same city.1 No one since seems to have been able to locate the original advert—Max Pensky admits he spent ten years searching for it—but it is described by Benjamin as follows: In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It was loaded with sacks bearing the words “Bullrich Salt.” One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words “Is the Best.” But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word “Bullrich Salt.” Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image for things that no one in this mortal life has yet experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia? (Arcades, 174).2 A better translation of this final question, whose German original is “ein Gleichnis für den Alltag der Utopie,” is “A likeness for the everydayness of utopia?,” as provided by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing (1989).3 As well as “likeness,” Gleichnis can be translated as “image,” “allegory,” or “parable,” so the [End Page 769] precise nature of the link between the poster and utopia, which Benjamin in any case phrases as a question, remains open. It is the nature of this relationship, and where it might lead in terms of analyzing advertising in modernist literature, that I aim to explore in this article.4 Benjamin’s fragment has been analyzed by critics in various ways, including by Ruth Iskin as part of a discussion of late nineteenth-century poster design; the authors of Benjamin’s Arcades: An unGuided Tour, who read it as an “imitation of Proust” akin to surrealism in the way it tears objects from their normal setting and juxtaposes them with others in order to illuminate the everyday; Esther Leslie, who also reads it as a Proustian involuntary memory, which connects personal and collective history and is dependent on the modern city as a place of meeting points and thresholds; and Max Penksy, whose extended reading associates it with Benjamin’s Berlin texts of childhood memory, as does Leslie, and positions it as a combination of dialectical image and commodity image in which heterogeneous times “telescope together” and “intermingle image-contents of a primaeval past with those of a utopian future” (Buse et al., Benjamin’s Arcades, 113; “Geheimmittel,” 123).5 While I find these analyses useful, especially Pensky on the play of presence and absence in the passage, I want to move away from previous readings and instead take Benjamin’s fragment as a spur to explore what I would like to call the “utopian moment” in modernist literature. I focus not on Marcel Proust or French surrealist writing, but on a selection of English and American modernist texts concerned with urban life, in which advertising confronts city dwellers with something like the everyday utopianism Benjamin describes. The examples I choose come from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1919). The politics of these texts varies (though it is worth noting that both Dos Passos and Wright were involved with communism at the time of writing), but all of them share the insight that when advertising suddenly and unexpectedly writes or rewrites the urban landscape, it turns language into a set of hieroglyphs...

Sociocultural Studies via CDA in Native Son (1939)

This paper aims at the study of the artistic features of language in Richard Wright’s Native Son. In order to pursue and achieve the mentioned goal, Critical Analysis (CDA) will be the applied approach, which provides analytical tools to uncover the socio-cultural aspects of texts by analyzing their in-text language. Modality, Metaphor and Racist Discourse are three major arguments to be studied under the CDA approach. By analyzing the predominant concerns of these three parts, this paper brings and reinterprets the serious problematic issues including power, the black oppression by the white, social limitations and racist ideology.

How Bigger Was Born Anew: Adaptation, Refiguration, and Double Consciousness in Nambi E. Kelley's Native Son

How Bigger Was Born Anew: Adaptation, Refiguration, and Double Consciousness in Nambi E. Kelley's Native Son

A History of the African American Novel by Valerie Babb

Reviewed by: A History of the African American Novel by Valerie Babb Robert Butler Valerie Babb. A History of the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge UP, 2017. 486 pp. $44.99. This is a much-needed comprehensive survey of the history and practice of the African American novel from the 1853 publication of William Wells Brown's Clotel to work done by contemporary writers such as Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Olympia Vernon. A special feature of the book is its detailed analysis of important fictional genres such as the neo-slave narrative, detective fiction, pulp novels, novels of the diaspora, and the speculative novel. Also included is an illuminating chapter that examines how African American novels have been adapted into films. Babb's work compliments and surpasses previous studies with its fresh insights and encyclopedic understanding of the roots and branches of the African American novel. She expertly surveys major trends and carefully explores the work of an extraordinary variety of major and minor figures. Her study is not limited by abstract theories that might narrow its scope and distort its findings. No monolithic vision of the African American novel is offered but, rather, a fair, balanced, and nuanced exploration that pays close attention to the rich diversity of forms, styles, and themes developed over time by a broad range of novelists. Moreover, the book is exhaustively researched and fluently written in a crystal-clear style that is happily free of jargon. Another attractive feature of the book is its elaborate bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. The early chapters provide important new insights into how African American newspapers and journals, along with black Protestantism and evangelicalism, helped to shape the work of early novelists in a fruitful process of "cross-fertilization." Babb also stresses how a "black canon" (69) was beginning to form in the first part of the twentieth century, and during the Harlem Renaissance a distinctively African American novelistic tradition was being shaped by using uniquely black folk forms and music. She regards the period spanning the 1940s to the 1970s as particularly significant because of the growing influence of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements as well as the development of independent black presses. This time also witnessed the flowering of the work of African American women. Black writers of the 1970s became strongly involved in the culture wars of the period and brought the black novel from the "margin" to the "center" of American literature. Babb characterizes the contemporary period as employing "a growing use of satire and experimentalism" (195) that has opened up new spaces for black fiction. Although the book does not lay a great deal of emphasis on the importance of individual "seminal" writers, stressing instead the steady, organic growth of a black novelistic tradition, it does point out the crucially important influence of a few pioneering writers. Richard Wright is credited with fostering "Chicago's emergence as a literary center" (195). And his masterwork, Native Son, is viewed as "the novel that would define the standard of what the black novel should be for years to come" (99), creating a "Wright School" in its own time and continuing to influence several generations of future writers. Zora Neale Hurston is seen as bringing a [End Page 61] "fresh narrative voice" (76) to black fiction, which would establish "the validity of black vernacular culture as a medium for novelistic form" (75). In this way, she exerted a strong influence on a wide range of writers that included Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Morrison and Walker, in turn, helped create new possibilities for female African American writers by creating "black female perspectives" that "shed new light on cultural attitudes toward race and gender" (159). Throughout the book Babb draws significant attention to nearly forgotten writers such as John Edward Bruce, Zara Wright, and George Wylie Henderson. And she gives very positive assessments of underappreciated novelists like George Schuyler, whom she regards as "One of the foremost black satirists of the twentieth century" (86). Dorothy West, all but forgotten until the publication of The Wedding very late in her life, is praised for her ability to "shed light on a...

On Hating the Provinces

On Hating the Provinces Carl Van Doren [End Page 185] From A Roving Critic, "Nooks and Fringes" Emerson lived in Concord and took villages for granted, as natural microcosms in any one of which a sage might study the world. Whitman lived in Manhattan and sent his imagination on strong flights over the entire body of his land, and to the remotest regions, neither denying nor rejecting whatever signs of life he saw. Lincoln in Springfield, whitherto by no means all the philosophies had come and little enough of culture in any composition, mastered not only an incomparable wisdom but an incomparable style. To no one of these men could it have been quite understandable that a second or third generation after them would begin to display among certain of its intellectual leaders that restless and intense hatred of the provinces which marks, for example, the critics of Paris and the professors of Berlin. Yet something of precisely this sort has come to pass. Voice after voice is added to the regiments of criticism being raised against suburban Philistia and the villatic bourgeoisie. That is to say, a reaction is commencing against the frontier which has had so large a hand in making us. It is no longer a natural device to put critical sagacity in the mouth of a rural sage. When Lowell created Hosea Biglow he did so with the brash originality of a young man who was taking venturesome shots at his age; no young American of Lowell's scholarship would think a second time of such a device today. Josh Billings and Artemus Ward to all but a few have come to seem "old stuff." Even Mr. Dooley is not a crossroads loafer but a native son of the city streets. In return for a long course of ridicule from rustic philosophers a new order of philosophes is striking back. We need not wonder, perhaps, that the riposte is often acrimonious; the weight of all this village ridicule has often been heavy. We need not feel too much distressed at the look of snobbishness which some of the critics of our frontier somewhat too continually wear; nothing ought to be so easy to forgive as a zeal for enlightenment. It is important to remember, however, that there is a point of vantage a little above this particular critical melee from which the battle appears less crucial than it doubtless appears to those who wage it. That point of vantage is the artist's, at least so far as the artist is concerned with the reproduction of life without the Puritan's anxiety to make it—or to make it out—the kind of life he thinks it ought to be. The moralist condemns the "bad" people and the wit condemns the dull; but these are phases of argument. With argument the dramatist or novelist is much less concerned. His task is first [End Page 186] of all a representation of what he finds, and his obligation ends—though he may decide to do more—when he has represented it. At his lowest level he yields himself wholly to the manners of his society and sets them forth with implied approbation, as if they were the laws of God. At a higher level, he turns violently against its prejudices and assails them as if they were the sins of Satan. But there is a level higher still, from which, as he looks upon his community, he sees it as men and women involved in the exercises of life, and he makes his record of them without either uncritical admiration or vexed recrimination. Those novelists and dramatists who now hate our provinces most are nearly all dissatisfied men lately escaped from stodginess and devoted to getting their revenges. In this fashion the heretic, while his wounds smart, lashes back at the doctrines which oppressed him. But the truly emancipated spirit no longer has time for recrimination or revenge. He goes, as artist, about his proper business, accepting stupidity as his material as well as intelligence, vice as well as virtue, gentleness as well as cruelty. In every community, he knows, all the types and tendencies of...

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner Ross Posnock John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 2019. 1,072 pp. $50.00. “Editions of letters and diaries say that a writer has arrived, or is still with us, much more than biographies do,” Darryl Pinckney remarked in his review of Trading Twelves (2000), the Ellison/Albert Murray letters. The warmly celebratory response in major media to The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison upon its publication in the fall of 2019 ratifies Pinckney’s point. Expertly introduced decade by decade by the incomparable John Callahan, The Letters arrive as a great gift to American literature, an intellectual feast of over a thousand pages, a volume that easily takes its place among the most important collections by any American author. The letters above all allow us to bear intimate witness to the birth of Ellison’s ideas (highlights include the 1941 and 1945 letters to Richard Wright, the 1945 letter to Kenneth Burke, and the 1970 letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman) expressed with remarkable force and pungency. Yet intellectual ferment is only one strand in this tapestry; another reveals the private Ellison. His early letters to his mother Ida are often preoccupied with requests for money—he hangs with a fast crowd at Tuskegee—but eventually come to express anguished empathy for her isolation (deserted by her second husband and “toiling from morning to night”), some reassurance that he is special even if unemployed (“every one thinks I’m a little odd and a bit gifted”) and outrage at a world so indifferent to poor people (“I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode”). These feelings culminate in an August 30, 1937 letter to Ida, the last one she reads before dying unexpectedly two months later. His romantic pain is vivid in two 1941 letters to Sanora Babb, herself a fledgling (white) novelist with whom Ellison was in love; in letters in the 1950s, he confesses to his wife Fanny his guilt and confusion in the wake of an extramarital affair while at the American Academy in Rome. A third strand are the exchanges with his literary circle—Murray, of course, but also during the 1950s, Saul Bellow, and more enduring if less intense friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. A fourth thread are the long, nostalgic letters to family and friends recalling the world of his fatherless childhood in Oklahoma City. “I have been returning on the average at least once over the last seven years,” he writes in 1971. “And when I get there, I’m like a ghost—or a Rip Van Winkle” who awakes to discover his world has changed. Each of these strands—I have summarized only the major ones—has its own particular cadence and voice, which makes The Selected Letters a virtuoso display of American prose. The Fall 2019 reviews and events (including a reading of letters at the Schomburg Library) reaffirmed Ellison’s cultural stature. And two of the major reviews (in The New Yorker by Kevin Young and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Saidiya Hartman) suggest that a younger generation of critics still find Ellison of considerable value even when some of their political and cultural views are at odds with his (I am thinking of Hartman’s feminism and Afropessimism). Hartman (December 19, 2019) subtly balances judgments: “ ‘Complexity,’ ” she begins, “was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often [End Page 241] disapproving and unsparing man.” Although “complexity” has long been a piety of literary humanism associated both with Ellison and with his fellow New York intellectual (and occasional antagonist) Lionel Trilling—suggesting their reverence for literature in the face of political and sociological reductionism—Hartman means something else by the word. This is clear from what soon follows upon “unsparing”: that Ellison’s “cult of the masculine hero” sought to restore “to the native son truth and...

『미국의 아들』, 『원어민』에 등장하는 ‘비오스와 조에’: 존재론적(Bios), 기능적(Zoe) 존재

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Richard Wright’s Native Son and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. These two novels have been commonly known as Bildungsroman in which the main characters experience racial conflict and find their identities through mental or emotional transformation obtained in their relationships with the surrounding society. Through their work, Richard Wright has revealed the tragic problems of racial discrimination caused by White community and explored the hardships which African-Americans had suffered in many ways, exposing the negative consequences of the discrimination to the public. If two previous novels by black writers concentrated on shedding light on the negative effects and destructive aspects caused by racial prejudice, such as the impossibility of identity building and of identity searching, during the time when racism was more overt and systematic, Chang-rae Lee’s novel has excluded many elements of racial discrimination based on skin color throughout the story. The precedent studies on these works, as above, have focused on the problems of identity experienced by people of color and immigrants: the ‘absence’ of humanity, the ‘exclusion’ from society, and the challenge of finding identity shown by the cultural ‘hybridity’.

Voting Preferences at Getasan Sub-District in Semarang Regency Head Election

The regional head election in Semarang Regency was followed by two candidate pairs namely Mundjirin-Ngesti Nugraha and Nur Jatmiko - Mas' Ridudwan. One of the candidates is an incumbent from the previous regent, Mundjirin. This research tries to analyze related to voter preferences in Semarang Regency Regent election. Data collection methods used were interviews, observation and literature study. From the results of the study, researchers found two factors that had a significant influence in influencing the preferences of the Getasan sub-district community voters in the Semarang Regent election, namely the popularity and success team of the candidate pair. The habit of blusukan to the community while serving as regent previously made the popularity of Mundjirin known by the community. This has become a big capital in influencing people's preference to choose because the community's trust in their leaders has been built. On the other hand, Mundjirin is paired with Ngesti where Ngesti is a native / native son of Getasan sub-district, making Getasan to contribute greatly in giving victory to this couple. In addition, Ngesti was also the chairperson of Commission C of the Semarang Regency DPRD with the vote of 14,728 as the only candidate to reach the BPP and have a good role in the Semarang community. The factor of the campaign team and volunteers also has a big contribution because the success team becomes a form of socialization that is more easily understood by the community and even the successful team moves up to the RT level, besides of course inviting family and colleagues who have the right to vote.

Diversion approach as an alternative case resolution son of the conflict with the law on child criminal justice system (case study of Merauke)

In terms of providing protection to children in conflict with the law, the government has made efforts to protect one of them is with the birth of Law No. 11 of 2012 on the Criminal Justice System Child. Where the Criminal Justice System Child is a whole process of settlement of children in conflict with the law, starting from the inquiry stage to the stage after undergoing criminal coaching. The protection of children in conflict with the law in the integrated justice system emphasizes child by placing the child in a special coaching institute child (LPKA). From the data in the hall correctional noted that native son of Papua committing an offense for the year 2018 as many as 52 children and for 2019 to the month of May as many as 24 children, so it can be seen that the crimes or offenses committed by children Papuans very much, Therefore, this study to the purpose to see how the diversion as an alternative approach to settling disputes children in problems in the law on juvenile criminal justice system. The research method is a method of Juridical Empirical legal research done by looking at the facts or issues raised in the public and subject it to the rule of law. In the implementation of diversion level, the police have not been too many who managed to carry out the process of diversion that of the number of cases of children in 2017 as many as 34 cases and succeeded in running a diversion which 7 cases, in 2018 the number of cases of children native Papuans were 52 cases and successfully execute diversion of as many as 11 cases was in 2019 until the month of May were 22 cases and conduct a successful diversion 1 case. the number of cases managed to do more with turnover versioned loss in the form of a sum of money, but at the level of the prosecutor to date, only one case recently successfully implemented in a court diversion and no one has succeeded in carrying out the diversion process. so thatneed the recommendation of the government to do legislatief the reviews related to the terms implementation of diversion, especially the crime of the threat of 7 years but there are no victims in the criminal alleged to the child that needs a special assistance prepared by the local government to the children of the indigenous Papuan conflict with the law.

The Unbearable Blackness of Being: De-Signifying the Signified in Richard Wright’s Native Son

Native Son dramatizes Bigger's struggle against the inhuman, deleterious cycle of white racism which effectively transforms blacks into their own negative stereotypes of blackness. He revolts against his socially constructed image and a socially assigned role that deny him identity and dignity. His self-perception is governed by the racially prejudiced images imposed on him. Throughout his life, he suffers for being black. The infamy of blackness darkens his existence, making him a victim of white oppression and white racist ideology. With his diminished capacity and depleted sense of self, he tries in vain to disentangle himself from the crippling impact of ideological and racial dominance. The significance of blackness changes for Bigger with the accidental killing of a wealthy white girl. Bigger's personality assumes a new self and his life takes a new turn after the murder, as he attaches new meanings to his black skin. The paper aims to explore Bigger's attempt to attain freedom from the negative self-image by subverting white people's definition of blackness and gain a potential self-hood and meaningful existence.

Adaptive Affective Cognition in Literature and Its Impact on Legal Reason and Social Practice

The concept of adaptive affective cognition is developed to explain the affective impact of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son on the judicial reasoning of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case of 1954. Although research in neuroscience clearly argues that affect contributes decisively to reason, few essays examine the processes, particularity, and significance of this contribution to literary experience. The authors use historical evidence to argue that the affective impact of Native Son reorganized cognitive practices authorized by segregation. Adaptive affective cognition explains the paradox of how Native Son, while triggering racist fears with the image of the violent, angry black man, also paradoxically reduced those fears.

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular

Meeting at the Watchtower:Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular Zachary Manditch-Prottas (bio) His Goat, Our Lamb: Soul on Ice and James Baldwin as Instructive Victim In his prison-time memoir Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power ideologue provocateur, attacked the racial authenticity and manhood of perhaps the most acclaimed and accomplished African American author of the decade, James Baldwin. Cleaver's critical aim was Baldwin's personal sexual practices and corresponding racial psychology, not his prose. Cleaver asserted that Baldwin's sexuality was, in essence, the manifestation of a "racial death-wish" (101). He argued that Baldwin's sexuality was a concession of his black manhood and signaled his engagement in an unachievable attempt to "becom[e] a white man in a black body" (103). Baldwin stood as the formative example of an evidential link between black male homosexuality and interracial homosocial obedience; a type of "succumb[ing] psychologically" (135) that manifested not solely as an involuntarily induced psychic condition but also as a literal act of masochistic interracial submission. Soul on Ice has acquired an infamous canonical status in African American letters as the era's most candid and illustrative declaration of the phallocentric interplay of racial and sexual politics. Cleaver's attack on James Baldwin is the most notorious and frequently cited example of homophobia in the Black Power era. The essay "Notes on a Native Son," in which Cleaver addresses Baldwin, has emerged in particular as ground zero terrain for considerations of black gay men as, to borrow a phrase from Robert Reid-Pharr, intraracial abject "scapegoat[s]" (603): those sacrificed in efforts to stabilize heterosexual black masculine subjectivity and prospective nationalist collectivity. Following this reasoning, Baldwin has served as the iconic embodiment of an internal racial boundary that at once threatened and fortified the union of heterosexuality with authentic black masculinity. Marlon Ross has suggested that the consistent centering of Cleaver's lambasting of Baldwin has overdetermined the perception of Black Power as unequivocally coupled with openly homophobic masculine posturing ("White Fantasies"). I agree with Ross that Cleaver's position on homosexuality and his focus on Baldwin to illustrate his position has significantly, and unfairly, saturated scholarly consideration of the relationship between masculinity and the Black Power ethos. A significant consequence of Ross's proposition is that Baldwin has been repeatedly victimized through persistent reproductions of the terms of Cleaver's discourse. In this respect, in critical evaluations of Cleaver's position, Baldwin's subjectivity is ironically and repeatedly usurped by those very sexualized terms of discourse that are being interrogated. In the context of Ross's argument, he suggests that centering Huey Newton's speech "On the Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements" would make for a vastly different narrative of Black Power, masculinity, and sexuality. In matters of gender and sexual progressiveness, Newton rightfully stands as Cleaver's epochal [End Page 179] opposite. Newton's evolution and public disavowal of homophobia and sexism is largely credited to the influence of James Baldwin as well as Jean Genet. It is notable, however, that Newton's 1973 essay, "Eldridge Cleaver, He Is No James Baldwin," can be read as the pioneering work in the now-familiar positioning of Baldwin as victim to interrogate Cleaver's homophobia and sexism and to question his sexuality. Newton's essay, while in fact quite deft in much of its psychoanalytic reading of Soul on Ice, functions largely as a curious piece of popular archival gossip. The most widely mentioned, but rarely closely considered, element of the essay is Newton's claim that in 1967, shortly after the publication of Soul on Ice, he saw Baldwin and Cleaver share an erotic kiss. Whether the story is true or revealing of Cleaver's "true" sexual identity is beside my point here. Newton's story is noteworthy because he uses Baldwin, whose privacy is presumably of no concern as he is, in Newton's words, "an admitted homosexual," as corporeal evidence of Cleaver's mindset and suppressed identity. Newton suggests that Baldwin kissed Cleaver to "expose" Cleaver. Of the kiss, Newton concludes that Baldwin, "who had neither written nor uttered a...

J. Blake Perkins. Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks.

J. Blake Perkins’s Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks focuses on the Arkansas Ozarks in the hilly northern part of the state, covering the period between the 1890s and the 1970s. Its cast is primarily small-scale farmers, represented by singular characters, moonshiners, a populist governor, and rural socialists. Writers have portrayed the Upland South as isolated, lawless, and full of antigovernment sentiment. Perkins’s premise is that the people of the Arkansas Ozarks were not isolated but rather participated in America’s general social, political, and economic trends. Furthermore, they demanded government involvement to promote equal opportunity and freedom for themselves. Up until the Great Depression, the Ozarks were awash with homegrown activism. What small farmers and the area’s working class did oppose was the manipulation of federal programs by local elites and businesses to benefit themselves. Perkins begins his story in the 1890s, when the Populists ignited rural America. Laissez-faire economics was not working for the Arkansas Ozarks. Native son Jeff Davis, whom political enemies branded “the Wild Ass of the Ozarks,” embodied the Populist political revolt. Davis railed against outside economic powers like railroads that made prosperity, or even security, unobtainable by small farmers and working families. Yet Davis and other southern political leaders fell back on the support of leading business interests, limiting the vote for African Americans and poor whites and generally engaging in race-baiting.

Reconciling Native Son and Native Daughters

Richard Wright’s novel meets serious resistance from students but sudden and intense media attention on a police manhunt for a young black man brings them a new perspective on the book.