Wright's Native Son Research Articles

Translating Cain: Emotions of Invisibility through the Gaze of Raskolnikov and Bigger by Samantha Joo

Reviewed by: Translating Cain: Emotions of Invisibility through the Gaze of Raskolnikov and Bigger by Samantha Joo Jeffrey H. Pulse samantha joo, Translating Cain: Emotions of Invisibility through the Gaze of Raskolnikov and Bigger (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020). Pp. xii + 187. $100. Samantha Joo approaches the narrative of Cain and Abel using a method designed to translate the emotional connotations of this ancient text. Since the author of the story wants to convey these emotional realities and the subsequent connotations of these emotions, the solution is to "recontextualize" the event in order to evoke similar emotions from the reader. J. argues for the story's transference of an emotional attitude to the reader because the power of the narrative resides in its ability to stir the emotions, not to stimulate the mind. In order to accomplish this, J. focuses on the issue of "invisibility" in the story of Cain and Abel using two classic examples from modern literature that contain this mythic plot: the character of Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son. Raskolnikov is a poor, young, ex-university student in nineteenth-century Russia, while Bigger Thomas is a poor, young, black man in Chicago in the 1940s. Both stories, while different in context and time, exhibit the same [End Page 304] mythic plot as seen in the Cain and Abel narrative—invisibility. (1) The character becomes invisible; (2) the character is emotionally distraught at being invisible; and (3) the character kills to find visibility. Thus, J. argues that seeing Cain's story through the characters of Bigger and Raskolnikov, characters who seek visibility through violence, even murder, will lead the reader to look at this ancient story differently. J. is interested in how invisibility molds and affects the character's emotions that then lead to violence. This approach does not try to discern authorial intent or consider the reader's response. Joo structures the book in five sections. In the first, she lays out the theoretical model and then explains the need for analogies. Section 2 is an analysis of the narrative of Cain and Abel, highlighting the social invisibility of Cain, which is implied in Cain's Kenite identity. Then, section 3 is an analysis of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and the character Raskolnikov, while section four treats Wright's Native Son and the character Bigger Thomas. Finally, in section 5, J. compares and contrasts the portrayals of Cain, Raskolnikov, and Bigger. The book is laid out to accomplish three distinct purposes. J. states, "On the theoretical level, I will provide a model that will convey emotional connotation of biblical stories via analogies. On the analytical level, I will highlight the Kenite identity of Cain that will explain the reason for the violence. On the social level, I will examine the phenomena of social invisibility and its violent consequence" (p. 6). I believe that J. accomplishes this quite well. The motivation for the murder of Abel is found in Cain's need to be "seen." He felt invisible/ignored by God as Abel and his sacrifice were preferred. To gain the attention of God, therefore, Cain killed his brother. But, as J. argues, this goes far deeper than personal rejection; it is the effect of social marginalization. Working beneath the surface is Cain's Kenite identity. The Kenites were a marginalized group of nomads, and so Cain is the ancestor who represents the Kenites' existence as an "invisible" group, alienated from the more established community. Thus, the rejection of Cain and his offering is a reflection of the social invisibility of the Kenites. J. argues that this Kenite identity is lost on the modern Western reader who is unfamiliar with the agropastoral background of Syro-Palestine; therefore, the intended meaning of the story is lost. Similar stories from modern literature provide an analogy that restores intended meaning to the text. Joo's example of this method of translating emotional connotations of an ancient text using modern literature as analogy is fascinating and useful. However, is it the only way to connect the modern reader to the text? Is it a valid method? Placing...

Aesthetics of Protest in Black American Literature: A Study of June Jordan’s Directed by Desires and Richard Wright's Native Son

The introduction of jazz and blues in the United States of America influenced the works of Afro American writers both in content and form. These jazz and blues musical songs were used as mediums to protest against racism, class, gender and other inhuman practices meted on the blacks in the United States. Although these songs were not formally written, they became a source of inspiration for writers afterwards in terms of themes and style. The later writers who changed to formal literature borrowed from the themes and styles of these jazz and blues musicians. This paper is signicant because it has examined the thematic preoccupation of June Jordan’ Directed by Desires and Richard Wright's novel, Native Son. Findings show that both writers were thematically and stylistically influenced by the jazz and blues era of art in Af ro American Literature. Data for this essay was collected via qualitative research methodology, while the postcolonial theory was adopted for analysis. The paper submits that themes of racism, class, gender and protest were features of the jazz and blues era which later writers modelled their works after.

The Intertextual Relationship between Sex and Crime in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

This study revolves around the intertexual relationship between sex and crime in Richard Wright's Native Son and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Intertexuality in its simplest meaning means the shaping of a text's meaning by another text's meaning. This paper deals with the topic of intertexuality based on the theoretical background of Bakhtin's theory of intertexuality as developed by Julia Kristeva and other critics. The study hypothesizes that there is an intertexual relationship between sex and crime in the two selected novels. Actually, the two writers use different styles of writing to depict their stand against racism. This paper aims at investigating the phenomenon of intertexuality between the two novels Wright's Native Son and Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in tackling the themes of sex and crime. By establishing an intertexual analogy between sex and crime, the two literary texts spotlight the predicament of discriminating people against their race or color. Richard Wright and Harper Lee use their novels to send warning messages against stereotyping the Afro-Americans because it propagates crime. Eventually, the human experiences as well as the themes of literary works are identified for their recurring resemblance through different eras.

Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism ed. by Carla Kaplan

Reviewed by: Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism ed. by Carla Kaplan Sharon L. Jones KAPLAN, CARLA, ed. Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. 284 pp. $18.12 paperback. With Quicksand: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, editor Carla Kaplan presents Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) as a ground-breaking text [End Page 312] due to protagonist Helga Crane. Kaplan writes that Helga is "one of the first truly 'intersectional' figures of women's literature, a character for whom the various strands of race, gender, class, and sexuality can never be disentangled (since all contribute to her misery)" (xxi). Readers will gain new insights about Larsen, an African American writer best known for the novellas Quicksand and Passing (1929), in relation to the past and the present. Kaplan's "Introduction: A 'Queer Dark Creature'" contextualizes Larsen's life and writing before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance and Modernist period. According to Kaplan, "Quicksand propelled her into celebrity as one of only two black women—Jessie Fauset was the other—considered major fiction writers" (ix). Kaplan asserts that Quicksand differs from other texts by Black Modernist writers, stating "Quicksand is one of the grimmest novels in modern black letters, a 'queer dark creature' unequalled (until Richard Wright's Native Son, in 1940) in its pessimism" (ix). According to Kaplan, "Most importantly, Larsen's work is now prized for its portrayal of black female subjectivity, its depiction of the consequences of repressing women's sexuality, and for its representation of the social and psychological vertigo caused when identity categories break down" (xxxii–xxxiii). "A Note on the Text" includes textual history and biographical details about Larsen and is followed by "The Text of Quicksand." Quicksand focuses on its biracial protagonist, who faces challenges related to sexism, socio-economic status, and racial identity while living in different regions of the US and abroad (including Denmark). By the text's end, Helga Crane struggles to cope with being a wife and mother in a southern US town where she feels stifled. The useful footnotes to Quicksand include information relevant to characters, settings, symbols, and plot. "Contemporary Reviews" provides perspectives from critics about Quicksand and other texts. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois's favorable 1928 review "Two Novels" in Crisis compares Quicksand to There Is Confusion by Jessie Fauset and examines the role of Black womanhood in Quicksand. In contrast, Wallace Thurman's 1928 review "High, Low, Past and Present" in Pittsburgh Courier acknowledges Du Bois's praise of Quicksand but criticizes the unsympathetic portrayal of Helga Crane and Quicksand's ending. "Nella Larsen's Writings" features Larsen's mixed 1929 "Review of Black Sadie" in Opportunity in which Larsen criticizes T. Bowyer Campbell's Black Sadie for its repetitiveness yet praises its depiction of a Black woman achieving success. This section also features Larsen's 1930 short story "Sanctuary" (Forum), which focuses on a character harbored by the mother of a person he killed. "Correspondence" includes letters to other writers, including Carl Van Vechten as well as Gertrude Stein. The letters to Van Vechten comment on Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, Ethel Waters, and Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep. The letters to Stein mention Carl Van Vechten and Paris. "Cultural Contexts" includes texts offering cultural commentary. Notable examples include Marita Bonner's 1925 "On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored" in The Crisis, which critiques racism and sexism, and Langston Hughes's 1925 poem "Cross" (The Crisis), which examines racial identity. An excerpt from "Cross" appears before Quicksand's first chapter, so the complete poem in "Cultural Contexts" could facilitate a deeper understanding of the poem's relevance to Quicksand. Sheila Kaye-Smith's 1922 "Mrs. Adis" from The Century Magazine focuses on Mrs. Adis, who provides shelter for Peter Crouch (who killed her son Tom). As Kaplan notes, Larsen faced an accusation that "Sanctuary" plagiarized "Mrs. Adis" (xxxi). [End Page 313] "Criticism" presents scholarship examining Quicksand from feminist, historical, biographical, and transnational perspectives. For example, Deborah McDowell's feminist critique in "The 'Nameless…Shameful Impulse:' Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing" (a reprinted excerpt...

Self-attainment in Richard Wright's Native Son and Alice Walker's The Color Purple

تتناول الدراسة مشکلة البحث عن تحقيق الهوية هي ليست وليدة اليوم لکنها ظاهرة قديمة. تشرح الدراسة کيفية البحث وتحقيق الهوية وأيضا المراحل المتتالية التي اتبعها کل من بطلي الروايتين لإيجاد هويتهم الحقيقية، کما تذکر الدراسة أسباب الشعور بانعدام الشخصية الفعلي، وتذکر منها الحالة الاقتصادية للعوائل الأفريقية – الأمريکية والخدمة، اللون، وأن تکون من أصول أفريقية، کذلک تشرح کيف تؤثر کل هذه العوامل على تصرفات الأمريکيين - الأفريقيين. الکلمات المفتاحية: رتشرد رايت أبن الوطن, أليس والکير اللون الارجواني, الأمريکيين – الأفريقيين, الهوية و انعدام العدالة.

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

Richard Wright's Native Son and Paul Robeson's Othello: Representations of Black Masculinity in Contemporary Adaptations of Othello

Richard Wright's Native Son and Paul Robeson's Othello: Representations of Black Masculinity in Contemporary Adaptations of Othello

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Writers of color in the U.S. have been producing novels, poetry, and essays in American letters since the eighteenth century, particularly African American writers.1 But before the social, cultural, and political movements and forces of the 1960s, very little literature by writers of color was institutionalized and/or in print. For example, before the 1970s, Three Negro Classics, comprising of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, was the most visible text by African Americans readily available. Although Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) remained in print, the bulk of African American literature was out of print until the 1970s. Although American Indians had been writing fiction, which was also consistently out of print, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was the publication of N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn in 1968, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown's best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) that initiated a renaissance in Native American history and literature in the 1970s. And although there were scattered out-of-print literary and autobiographical texts by Asian American writers from the early and middle parts of the twentieth century such as Korean-American Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937), Japanese-American John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chinese-American Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and some autobiographies (Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, 1953), Asian American literature becomes visible and begins to emerge as a legitimate field of inquiry with the publication of some ground-breaking anthologies and of Maxine Hong [End Page 173] Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). The situation with Latino/a literature in print was equally as dismal. As the Hispanic Recovery Project informs us, there were unpublished and/or out-of-print Mexican/Mexican American testimonials at the turn of the twentieth century. But before the 1960s there were only a scattering of Latino/a texts in print such as Pocho (1959) by the Mexican American writer Jose Antonio Villareal. But with the transformative Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—including the Chicano movement and the groundbreaking work of the Chicano/a Arts movement, the Puerto Rican labor activist movement and the Nuyorican Arts movement, American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian literary renaissance, the nationalist/Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Asian American movement, and the Women's movement, the 1970s and 1980s were renaissance periods for the literatures of American Indians, Latinos/as, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Thus, by the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the literature of writers of color in the U.S. had grown and matured, successfully challenging and transforming American literature, which continues until today. The literatures that emerged from this period were further developed and institutionalized with the re-printing of pre-1960s literary texts, the establishment of ethnic studies programs and departments on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and the inclusion of ethnic literature in mainstream American literature courses, allowing the literatures to be taught, studied, assessed, written about, and therefore to remain in print. Although some of the literatures written by people of color in the 1960s and 1970s overtly protested institutional, legal, and de facto racism, and captured the experiences of oppression/victimization, of colonization, and of the pain and confusion of being caught between two cultures, by the 1980s and 1990s many writers of color had come to assume the centrality of their race or ethnicity in their literature. This shift allowed them to move beyond protest, the white gaze, and the various binaries that positioned them as lower halves of binary oppositions, to take on the literary styles and issues of modernity/post-modernity, to...

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses by Richard Wright

Reviewed by: Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses by Richard Wright Brennah Hutchison (bio) Wright, Richard. Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses. Ed. Earle V. Bryant. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2015. Earle V. Bryant's Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses historically contextualizes Wright's journey as a journalist with several publications during the years he was associated with the US Communist Party. Bryant's critical book chronicles the celebrated writer's activism not through his well-known literary works, but through his lesser-known periodical pieces that were featured in publications such as the Daily Worker (1921–1958), New Masses (1926–1948), and New Challenge (1937).1 Byline presents a detailed roadmap of Wright's editorial passage through an America that is suffering due to the Great Depression. The critical text examines the historic events that Wright humanized in an attempt to shed light on issues like: the African American livelihood in an impoverished Harlem, where many residents could not even afford the inflated price of milk; America as a global citizen in an ever-changing sociopolitical milieu; how Joe Louis came to represent democracy in his infamous match against Nazi Max Schmeling; [End Page 117] the unlikely faces of African American members within the Communist Party, like Mother Ross who was born a slave; and the importance of art as propaganda through the life and folk lyrics of Huddi Ledbetter. Bryant illustrates that Wright's journalistic work showcased the author's ability as an active observer/writer and his talent for encapsulating an era of political instability on local and international levels. Bryant aims to demonstrate that Wright immortalized the everyday [wo]man, along with the celebrated, in order to create a realistic snapshot of the late-1930s in America. Bryant is successful in representing this; Wright's articles that he includes exemplifies the author's sense of responsibility, not only to the US Communist Party, but also to his fellow residents in Harlem and America in general. Much like Bigger Thomas in Wright's legendary Native Son (1940), within his periodical pieces Wright typifies the need to focus on all facets of human nature in order to produce a more fulfilling picture. Byline is organized into five sections. For the most part, each section focuses on major/ minor and international/local historical events that affected the United States, and the African American community specifically. "Section One: The Shame Spot of New York" highlights Wright's never-ending work when it came to disclosing the inhabitable conditions of Harlem. Bryant makes a point of exhibiting Wright's social actions through a stoical pathos with his Daily Worker article "Negro, with 3-Week-Old Baby, Begs Food on Streets": While Wright's account of Harlem's battered and bruised souls is heart-rending, his intent is not to evoke tears. 'If you are the type to weep,' he writes at the conclusion of 'Negro . . . Begs Food,' then 'you can have a good cry over this and then feel good, 'purged,' you know. But tears can't stop starvation.' Wright's primary purpose is to effect action, reform. (18) In addition, pieces like "A.L.P. Assemblyman Urges State Control of Price of Milk" were also featured in the Daily Worker. Readers have no choice but to confront the devastating lifestyle of Mr. and Mrs. Adolphus Green and their children of Harlem: What does this 1-cent per quart increase in the price of milk mean to a Negro family in Harlem? Mount the steps at 14 E. 120th St. and knock . . . you want to know how the rise in the price of milk will affect their living? . . . The children, including the mother and father, are undernourished. In telling the ages of her children, Mrs. Green declared timidly: 'I'm always ashamed to tell people how old my children are, they are so small. They simply don't get enough to eat.' (33–34) Bryant establishes that Wright has the skill to drag the reader along with him in his journalistic endeavors in an impoverished Harlem situated in the Great Depression. "Section Two: The...

The Use of Racist Lexical Items and Irony in Richard Wright's Native Son

The Use of Racist Lexical Items and Irony in Richard Wright's Native Son

Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, and Morrison by Doreen Fowler (review)

FOWLER, DOREEN. Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2013. x + 173 pp. $35.00. Cloth. In contrast to dominant Oedipal interpretations of the father as a divisive figure who introduces opposition and exclusion, Doreen Fowler, drawing on the work of Jessica Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, renders a more complex, paradoxical portrait of the father's role in establishing identity. Through readings of work by William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison, Fowler traces the father's acculturating role as a figure who intervenes and connects, enabling an interfacing of and other (20). Deeply engaged with the nuances of psychoanalytic theory, Drawing the Line thus sophisticatedly unpacks the father's function in creating a play of identification and interrelation that allows for cultural exchange and cultural specificity (6). Though the authors Fowler analyzes write from distinct raced and gendered subject positions, their work is collectively forged in and against the racial crucible of the American South, and her re-readings of the father figure provide a way of thinking beyond familiar explications of white paternalism. Drawing the Line begins by examining Faulkner's 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust. In this standout chapter, Fowler inventively illustrates how Lucas Beauchamp dismantles the notion that the father's authority rests on an exclusionary, oppositional violence, instead seeing in him an alternative to a Western exclusionary model of paternal authorization (16). Intruder's dynamic of burial and disinterment, repression and revival, are symbolic, she argues, of a buried interrogation of exclusionary, binary meanings, including that of black-white difference (47). Fowler next follows issues of identification, interrelation, difference, and domination by examining Wright's Native Son (1940). Drawing on Kristeva's theory of abjection, she argues that, in a white culture than denies him belonging, Bigger Thomas's conflicting desires for individuation and integration lead to both his drive for solidarity and his tragic impulse for violence. Wright, she argues, strives to find a way to reconcile and ameliorate Bigger's competing drives in the figure of Max, his lawyer and father figure, who bequeaths the necessary boundaries for his individuation. In the following chapter, Fowler continues to trace the father's role in enabling individuation in the work of O'Connor. Her fiction is, as Fowler reads it, filled with fatherly border figures who straddle a liminal, prophetic space between self and other and between human and Divine (18). …

Foregrounding the Quest for Lost Identity in Wright's Native Son

This paper revisits Wright’s Native Son, a great yet controversial mid-twentieth century novel, by adopting the aspect of lost identity and its related perspectives in the sense that blacks living in America must have a sense for their bereft and violated identity and belonging. The sovereignty of white world among African-Americans undermines, obliterates, or ignores the established national borders, while large number of people are dispersed across wide geographical areas, and diasporas identities are formed along multiple geographical locations, the results of slavery, exile, or emigration. The diasporas identities are provided by a decoupling between the dominating power and people's real identities. These identities may develop along cosmopolitan, multi-racial and multilingual lines. They produce a pluralized identity among the people of such domain; they are subject to change the linguistic, ethnic, hence they will be marginalized and racial merger will make them quest their own real identity, because they have become the emptied-out shell. Consequently, these conditions provide extensive struggles among African-American people to gain their lost identities; it is transparently the same fact which the present study is to look for, in order to demonstrate and foreground some instances of the sense of lost identity, in Wright's Native Son. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n13p653

Richard Wright's Nameless NATIVE SON

In his insightful analysis of the images of blindness and sight in Richard Wright's Native Son, James Nagel maintains that blindness functions throughout the novel as a metaphor for white society's...

Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity

As Bigger Thomas sits wedged uncomfortably between the young, would-be radicals Jan and Mary, Mary touches Bigger's arm and gestures the tall, apartment buildings of Chicago's South Side, telling him, You know, Bigger . . . I've long wanted go into these houses . . . and ]ustsee how your people live.1 To anyone familiar with the history of documentary photography, it's hard not read this scene early in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) as a pointed satire of the documentary aesthetic. Mary's comment that she wants how your people live carries with it strong connotations of Jacob Riis's seminal How the Other Half Lives (1890), emphasizing the documentary's power of sight interpret, interpellate-and invade-the dark and seemingly unknowable lives of the poor and marginal. Likewise, that her statement is made as Mary imposes an unwanted, or at least highly transgressive, intimacy between she and Bigger further suggests the ways in which the documentary impulse is one of crossing barriers and borders-an impulse that often works reinscribe as much as overcome the privilege on which the borders are founded. As a figure of the documentarian, Mary Dalton fits this role all too tragically: a wealthy progressive who believes that if she is allowed to the conditions in which poor African Americans live, this uniquely visual regime of knowing will transform her and lead her political action. This emphasis on sight, underscored by Wright's italics, as the crucial precursor progressive change is, as critics have argued, the ontology of the political documentary. That Jan and Mary have essentially kidnapped their black subject of knowledge and that their act of vision on the South Side produces race/ism rather than resolves it could easily be taken as Wright's final statement on the 1930s radical documentary.For all of Wright's pointed satire, it's equally important note that less than a year after the publication of Native Son, Wright edits a selection of documentary photographs that do exactly what Mary expresses she wants do: go into tall, apartment buildings and justsee how Wright's people live. As Native Son murders its own white documentarian, then we must ask what the relationship is between Mary's misguided, ultimately desire see and even touch how the Other lives and Wright's own documentary impulse do just that in 12 Million Blac Voices (1941). I would argue that 12 Million Blac Voices-Richard Wright's documentary photo-montage of the Great Migration-is not merely the nonfiction companion Native Son as it was advertised, but rather the culmination of Wright's own contradictory and dialectical concerns with the politics of black representation. In killing the documentarian-the white chronicler of black life-Wright does not abandon the public sphere dominated by a white gaze. As documentary photography has been a significant means by which the West has constructed and codified modern ideas of race, Wright's critique of the mode and his insistence on its constructed nature call into question the very possibility of a visible regime of knowing. Yet, the documentary is also the form perhaps most associated with the political and representational projects of modernity. As Paula Rabinowitz notes, documentary photography is also the medium that can translate the into the future and redeem, in a Benjaminian fashion, the wreckage of history.2 Thus, for Wright, the documentary image stands at just that nexus of historical trauma and liberation that ends 12 Million Blac Voices, the past living in the present and the new procession and new tide of revolutionary progress.3 Like Wright's own contradictory statements on modernity, at once based on the deadly web of slavery and higher human consciousness, photography for Wright becomes an expression of a racial past, as well as a liberatory future.4 For Wright, the documentary image's dialectical mode-containing technologies of both liberation and domination-is thus Wright's precise claim on African American modernity. …

Living for the city: urban displacement and incarceration in Wright's Native Son and Rajabu's ‘Masudi’

One of the neglected areas of globalization studies is the movement of people within countries. In post-colonial African nations and the antebellum United States, migration patterns have often been to urban areas. Two creative works which bear witness to these relocations are Richard Wright's novel Native Son and Marijani Rajabu's popular song ‘Masudi’. Both works confront the alienation and incarceration of young black men who find themselves unable to integrate into the urban geographies of Chicago and Dar es Salaam through different rhetorical strategies orchestrated in order to precipitate realizations in their respective audiences. Mojawapo ya malengo yasiosisitizwa katika masomo ya utandawazi ni yale yanayohusiana na uhamiaji wa watu ndani ya nchi zao. Kwenye nchi za Afrika baada ya uhuru na nchi ya Marekani baada ya tarikhi ya utumwa uhamiaji wingi ulikuwa ukielekea kwenye miji mikubwa. Kazi mbili za ubunifu ambazo hushuhudia uhamiaji huo ni riwaya ya Native Son ya Richard Wright na wimbo wa “Masudi” uliotungwa na Marijani Rajabu. Kazi hizo zote mbili zinakabiliana na kutengwa na kufungwa jela kwa vijana wawili weusi ambao wanajikuta hawawezi kujijumlisha na majiografia ya miji ya Chicago na Dar es Salaam. Wasanii hawa hutumia mbinu za balagha za tofauti ili kusababisha matekelezo akilini mwa hadhira zao binafsi. Maneno maalum: mahusiano kati ya nakala; uhamiaji; masomo ya Afrika; kufananisha mbinu za fasihi; masomo ya kustaarabika mjini

Even Better than the Real Thing: Boris Vian, Vernon Sullivan, and Film Noir

The light-skinned Negro who passes permanently cuts himself off completely from the colored world.... Sometimes he prepares for the adventure by learning Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. He thus becomes foreigner, and as everyone knows, foreigner is apt to be any shade color --Herbert Asbury, Who is Negro? (1946) In 947, year after its publication, Sullivan's novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves) topped the best-seller lists in Paris, selling in the region half-million copies. Set in the American South, with strong echoes William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Richard Wright's Native Son, J'irai cracher narrates the tale Lee Anderson, an African American who passes for in the small town Buckton. (1) As the novel unfolds, the narrator reveals that he has come to Buckton to avenge the lynching his brother. During the course the novel, Anderson rapes and then murders two wealthy sisters to exert what he claims is racial vengeance. The book's Boris Vian, wrote in his preface to the novel that I Spit could never have been published in America, claiming that it had been refused publication in the U. S. because the descriptions violence performed by black man on women. In the preface, Vian gives an account how Sullivan, an African American who passed for white, had fled the racial oppression the United States to settle in Paris. One must see, Vian writes, a manifestation desire for revenge in race still ... badly treated, and terrorized, sort temptation exorcism 'real whites' (viii). And yet it was in France that the controversy erupted: the novel was banned by the French government in 1949, becoming the first book since Madame Bovary to be tried for obscenity in France (Campbell, Exiled 17). The history the novel took further twist when, in apparent fulfilment the censors' fears, middle-aged businessman strangled his mistress, leaving copy Sullivan's novel by the side the bed. French journalists were quick to point out that the murderer had circled several passages Sullivan's novel, including graphic description strangulation (Campbell, Exiled 82). During the media furor, it transpired that the novel's translator, Boris Vian--a writer, dramatist, jazz musician and composer--was in fact the author I Spit. Vernon Sullivan was fictional nom de plume Vian had created. This was case, as James Sallis neatly puts it, of man (Vian) pretending to be black man (Sullivan) writing novel about black man (Lee Anderson) pretending to be white (Vian x). According to several accounts, Vian wrote I Spit after bet with his friend Jean d'Halluin, the director Editions du Scorpion who wanted to rival the success Gallimard's Serie Noire. A best seller? Vian asked. Give me ten days and I shall manufacture one for you (Cismaru 28). The result, produced little later than the ambitious ten days, was I Spit on Your Graves. The film version Vian's novel was shown in 1959. When the movie was first screened, Vian reluctantly went to the viewing, keen to make sure that his name had been expunged from the credits project from which he wanted to distance himself. Several minutes into the film, Vian cried out, These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!, whereupon the writer suffered heart attack and was shortly pronounced dead (Vian ix). Vian is probably best known outside France for his novel L'Ecume des jours (translated variously as Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo, and Foam the Daze) but he also wrote some well-known antiwar songs in the mid-1950s during the Algerian conflict. His best-known song, Le Deserteur, became big hit for Peter, Paul, and Mary in the mid-1960s as Vietnam protest song, and yet despite his transatlantic appeal in song, his literary work has not had the critical attention it merits; Gast's film version the book is barely noted in critical writing or reviews. …

The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence P. Jackson (review)

Reviewed by: The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence P. Jackson Michael Lackey Lawrence P. Jackson . The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 579 pp. $35.00. Dauntingly ambitious and brilliantly executed, Lawrence Jackson's The Indignant Generation deftly charts the ideological twists and narrative turns of African American literature and criticism from the hopeful days of New Deal economics to the tense days of pre-Black Power racial nationalism. In a surprising but effective move, Jackson uses the tortuous career of the now somewhat obscure scholar-novelist J. Saunders Redding to define the dilemmas facing black writers during this relatively neglected period. Considered one of the deans of African American scholarship from the 1950s through the 1970s, Redding was the author of To Make a Poet Black (1939), a sweeping study of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the 1930s. Yet he also made a name as a serious novelist, whose Stranger and Alone (1950) anticipated Ellison's soon-to-be-published Invisible Man (1952). What interests Jackson most in Redding are the conflicts he encountered as he navigated his way through his age's political, aesthetic and social minefields. As both a critic and imaginative writer, Redding found himself caught between racially charged protest literature and politically disengaged modernist aesthetics, between racist American democracy and race-uplift communist movements, and between black assimilationists and black nationalists. The Indignant Generation pivots on these dilemmas, which, according to Jackson, injured Redding's writing life and significantly damaged his later reputation. What is more important, however, is that Jackson uses these dilemmas to illuminate the lives and works of numerous writers from the mid-twentieth century. Jackson's ability to provide a multilayered context in which great works emerged is inestimably valuable. For instance, in the lead-up to his discussion of the momentous publication of Wright's Native Son in 1940, Jackson skillfully examines the influence of Sterling Brown's searing analysis of stereotypes of blacks in U. S. literature, the degree to which "communism was helping blacks to become twentieth-century Americans" (57), the repudiation of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, the positive [End Page 256] impact of the Julius Rosenwald Fund ("the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s" [97]), and African American intellectuals' knotty but escalating critique of white liberals. Taken alone, each of these examinations is stimulating and insightful. But when one realizes how they work together to set the stage for Jackson's chapter "Bigger Thomas among the Liberals," the cumulative effect is intellectually staggering. This is not to say that Jackson shapes all this material to offer a new interpretation of Wright's novel. Rather, his focus is on the "Native Son effect—really the Bigger Thomas effect," which "stimulated an enormous growth in consciousness in American audiences and publishers" (125). Bigger replaced "the stereotype of Uncle Tom" in the minds of blacks and whites (125). His challenging character forced writers to do more "dense psychological realist exploration" (130), and established Wright as "the point man for black defiance in the 1940s" (138). Put simply, Jackson persuasively demonstrates just why black writers felt compelled to take their aesthetic and political cues from Wright after 1940. Native Son put white liberals, in particular, in an uncomfortable position. After Wright's searching depiction of the Dalton family (the Daltons' financially support the NAACP but get rich from slum tenements), these liberals began to take a more serious approach to the issue of race. For instance, the editor Thomas Sancton produced "a cutting edge kind of literary criticism" imagining "a world uninflected by race bias" (155). In 1943, Bucklin Moon published The Darker Brother, which established his "credentials as the most liberal white American novelist" (153). A year after its appearance, Jackson claims, "white writers no longer delved into extended caricature with the presumption that it might stand in for serious literature" (156). By the mid-forties, however, black writers began to refine techniques for picturing "the unconscious of white America," the dark realm where writers such...

“Looking across the Atlantic” in Caryl Phillips's In the Falling Snow

Caryl Phillips's novel In the Falling Snow (2009) explores a spectrum of black British diasporan positions, moving from the early optimism and subsequent disappointment of the Windrush generation of migrants to encounter the difficulties facing second- and third-generation black Britons in a sometimes inhospitable and turbulent country. This article argues that In the Falling Snow is especially interested in the lasting relationship between black America and black Britain – evidenced not least of all by the novel's intertextual relationship with works by Richard Wright. Critics have mentioned the significance of Wright's novel Native Son (1940) to Phillips's choice of career, and it is clear that the concerns of this novel with the politics of mixed-race relations finds commonality with Phillips's works. However, the connections between Wright's haiku and Phillips's In the Falling Snow are equally important, and reveal an evolving, and reflective, relationship with Wright. Although the associations between Phillips and Wright suggest a continuation of Phillips's interest in the relationship between black Britain and black America, the black British identity explored in In the Falling Snow is both crucially informed by, but also different from, black American identifications.

From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem: Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge

From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem:Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge John Claborn (bio) Known for its tragic portrayal of the early-twentieth-century Great Migration, William Attaway's 1941 novel Blood on the Forge follows in the naturalist and black Marxist tradition of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). As critic Philip H. Vaughan rightly assesses, one of the novel's central conflicts is the "clash between pastoral and industrial-urban living" (424) as it "becomes an angry repudiation of industrial life as destructive to human values" (422). Employing both naturalism and pastoralism to dramatize this clash, Attaway curiously breaks out of these two representational modes through his use of a relatively minor secondary character named Smothers, a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain: "[o]ne of the men whispered that Smothers was off his nut. Yet they listened and heard a different sort of tale: 'It's wrong to tear up the ground and melt it up in the furnace. Ground don't like it. It's the hell-and-devil kind of work'" (52–53). His legs dismembered in a brutal steel mill accident, Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, [End Page 566] and made into steel. Because he brings an ecological perspective to the ethical and ontological relations among worker, machine, and earth, his character appears on the literary scene as an enigma not only for the Great Migration narrative, but also, perhaps, all of early-twentieth century African American literature. This article explores this strange anomaly of Smothers and the ecological themes of Blood on the Forge. Literary critics have acknowledged the importance of Smothers for articulating the novel's twin themes of machinic violence performed on worker and land. Edward Margolies goes the furthest in this direction when he conflates Smothers's worldview with Attaway's, arguing that the novel condemns "a kind of greed that manifests itself as a violence to the land, a transgression of Nature" (xiv). Yet no critic has fully explored its ecological themes, nor asked why a novel published in 1941 and set in 1919 should so strongly anticipate the various environmentalist movements that hit mainstream American cultural and political discourse in the 1960s. Perhaps this marginalization is due partly to the novel's critical reception and classification as African American fiction, a category typically perceived as tackling social injustices rather than environmental causes.1 Alan Wald reads the novel within the political context of the late 1930s, calling Attaway a black Marxist "whose exertions were aimed in part at educating the white labor movement about the corrosive costs of continued racial chauvinism" (282). Wald cites Attaway's involvement with the Communist Party as evidence for his strong political commitments, though Blood on the Forge reveals more an analyst of race and capitalism than a propagandist supplying cultural weapons for an American October Revolution. We never see in Blood on the Forge the triumph of racial accommodation and assimilation, or the awakening of class consciousness. Set in 1919, when World War I had cut off migratory flows from Europe and thus depleted the pool of cheap immigrant labor in northern industrial cities, the novel follows the three Moss brothers—Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody—as they migrate from the Jim Crow South to the industrial wasteland of western Pennsylvania. As historian Carole Marks pinpoints in her analysis of the Great Migration, northern steel mill employers saw that if they could maintain the influx of racially diverse labor, they could rely on perpetual conflict to undermine organized labor (15). The narrative ends tragically with one brother dead, another blinded by a mill explosion, and the third with an injured hand that prevents him from "slick[ing] away" his blues on the guitar (1). The two surviving brothers catch a train ride farther north to Pittsburgh proper, each feeling uncertain about his future. Attaway's protest is bleak, even nihilistic, but it does testify [End Page 567] to the singular experience of workers who might otherwise be lost in a Chicago School sociologist...