Reading Richard Wright beyond the Carceral State

Abstract

This chapter by Laura Grattan offers an alternative to critics and admirers who equate Wright’s resistance to white supremacy and capitalism with either ressentiment or violence. Drawing on Native Son, Black Boy, and 12 Million Black Voices, the essay argues that Wright constructs a multifaceted politics of refusal that puts the regeneration of the body and its aesthetic senses at the center of struggles to create “new and strange way[s] of life.” Individual and collective transformation entails repertories of refusal that lessen attunement to an antiblack social order and that make possible generative practices necessary for freedom. The essay concludes by evaluating the creative potential of refusal in movements to abolish policing and prisons.