{"title":"Richard Wright","authors":"James B. Haile","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Richard Wright is an African American writer traditionally read within the American (and Western) literary realist framework. There is, though, a growing body of scholarship around his later haiku nature writing. Within this scholarship, scholars have theorized the ways in which his political thinking influenced his adaptation of the Japanese haiku form. Little of the scholarship, traditional or burgeoning, has focused on the ways in which the “nature thinking” present in his later haiku was already present throughout his early, middle, and late writing. But, what is more, little of the scholarship focuses on the ways in which his nature thinking was formative to the development of his “literary realism.” This chapter by James B. Haile III not only demonstrates the linkage between “nature thinking” and politics in his prose but also argues that Wright himself both participated in and was formative to the development of black nature writing in the United States.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130658761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"I Have Seen Black Hands","authors":"R. Wright","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Richard Wright’s “I Have Seen Black Hands” sets the tone for the first section on radical politics. Describing hands that, like his, are black, Wright recounts their hungry reaching for life. These hands produced riches for others and served the country through military service. When the economic tides turned, however, African Americans were left without paid employment or remuneration for their labor. What is more, they faced unfair punishment or lynching when they sought a share of the profits they had made for others. The poem culminates in a call for their hands to turn into revolting fists, joined by those of working, nonblack others.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132975928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"He’s a Rapist, Even When He’s Not","authors":"T. Curry","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Tommy J. Curry considers Wright’s views on gender in terms of the historical reality of black males’ vulnerability to sexual violence at the hands of white men and white women. Curry explores Wright’s impassioned response to the 1951 trial and execution of fellow Mississippi native Willie McGee. McGee had been charged with having raped a white woman, Williametta Hawkins, who had been described as his mistress but who, in fact, had threatened to cry rape if he refused her advances. Curry reports that at that time, black men, often out of economic need, were sometimes coerced into sexual intercourse by threats of false accusations of rape. Otherwise, they would be either literally or metaphorically lynched. In a way unprecedented in Wright scholarship, Curry frames Wright’s “The Man of All Work” as an allegory for the rape of McGee. In the story, a black man cross-dresses in search of employment in domestic work. This leads to a series of misunderstandings and misidentifications by whites that almost kill him. Curry concludes that this story was far more than a clever plot: it effectively expressed a particular set of humiliations and dilemmas faced by black men.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126504549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Richard Wright and Black Women","authors":"F. Hayes","doi":"10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Floyd W. Hayes III begins his chapter with the argument that apart from the figure of Aunt Sue in Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star,” Wright’s male-centered narratives often treated women characters as objects or props in male-ordered worlds, used to explain the protagonist’s situation rather than their own. Hayes argues that for Wright, black womanhood was marked by abjection. And, because black women suffered from deep, unsatiated hungers and prolonged experiences of impotence, they in turn participated in the stunting of black sons. Hayes concludes that Wright’s view of how alienation is expressed in and through misogyny and sexism and in relations with male characters who feel themselves homeless, limited his vision of black struggle.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124014651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alternative Readings of Bigger Thomas","authors":"C. E. Zirakzadeh","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Bigger Thomas, one of Richard Wright’s most memorable and distinctive fictional creations, has been interpreted in vastly different ways. This is partly because readers bring to Native Son different sets of beliefs about US capitalism, about the psychology of US racism, about the spiritual resources of black communities, and about the commitments and priorities of the United States government. This chapter, by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, compares how Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright interpreted Bigger’s story. The comparison reminds us of the variety of political projects to which the story can be put to use, and the possible futures for the United States—from working-class fascism, to state-led progressivism, to black communalism, to interracial fantasies and nightmares—that Bigger’s tale can illuminate.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130750112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory","authors":"C. Robinson","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Cedric J. Robinson’s previously published essay discusses how Wright’s art expresses both the terrors and the possibilities of modern times. According to Robinson, Wright’s choices of literary forms enabled him to explore the complexities and subtleties of radical politics more authentically than conventional history, biography, or political-tract writing would allow. Through novels, Wright brought living consciousness into direct confrontation with social theory and ideology. Believing that Marxist ideology paternalistically remained for rather than of the (especially black) proletariat, Wright wanted to draw on existing folklore to express blacks’ deep and complex consciousness. Robinson argues that for the Communist Party USA to make good on its promise to serve as the greatest guarantee against fascism, it had to come more fully to terms with the appeal of fascism among the working class. Wright’s art tried to make sense of that troubling phenomenon.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130957423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Masculinity, Misogyny, and the Limits of Racial Community","authors":"P. Gilroy","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic offers a different perspective on Wright’s thinking regarding relations between black men and women, and about the ability of black communities more generally to offer liberating narratives of racial authenticity. Gilroy suggests that one legacy of the racially coercive Jim Crow South was domestic authoritarianism, as well as violence in public and intimate relations. Wright recognized this and openly addressed it in his art. According to Gilroy, Wright manifested a protofeminism in his early work and later seemed to recognize the place of black women in racial struggle. At the same time, Wright thought that the stresses of modern black life meant that racial identity, on its own, could not guarantee racial solidarity or even fraternal association. This was evident in Wright’s portraits of black homophobia, misogyny and other antisocial attributes that could not be ascribed solely to racism. This frankness, Gilroy worries, is misunderstood by those who would read him in a narrowly US black context rather than alongside his diverse interlocutors on both sides of the Atlantic.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131007968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Richard Wright beyond the Carceral State","authors":"L. Grattan","doi":"10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0020","url":null,"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,\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125350103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Slavery Continued, Freedom Sought","authors":"J. Gordon","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Jane Anna Gordon argues that Wright, while stressing the economic legacies of racialized enslavement, also explored three features of slavery that have persisted since its formal abolition: (1) the absence of a relationship between that for which enslaved people were responsible and that for which they were punished; (2) a legacy of “two races locked in daily combat”; and (3) the treatment of black people as if they had no kin. According to Wright, even though nonblack descendants of slaves have arguably become free of the histories of their ancestors, such freedom remains elusive for African-descended communities. For most black people, “postslavery” has been a protracted racialized neoslavery. Widespread public embarrassment regarding slavery’s continued grammar has not been matched by commitment to its actual eradication. Consequently, even though Wright himself was able to steal himself away from US unfreedom, this fell short of his normative ideal of freedom.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117285881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Behind the McGee Case","authors":"R. Wright","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Originally written for French audiences in 1951, Richard Wright seeks to address the question of how Willie McGee could be executed in Mississippi when doing so was clearly considered unjust in the world of democratic opinion. Wright settles the question of McGee’s innocence in a sentence and so turns to the plantation economy of Mississippi in an effort to contextualize the events. The most backward of US states in educational, cultural, and social terms, nothing had transpired economically since the Civil War to relieve whites’ complete domination of blacks, even though blacks vastly outnumbered whites in terms of population. This meant that whites had to hold state power through ongoing racial violence, terror, and repression. Still, after World War II, brutal lawlessness on the part of the United States became an international liability requiring that a move be made from extralegal to legal lynching. While white Mississippians had not anticipated that McGee’s execution would have negative global consequences, their barbarous standing in the eyes of the world was less significant to them than local pressures to defend white power over blacks. This did not mean that international agitation was without effect: it would force white Americans to think hard before staging another legal lynching and about the price of their continued race prejudice.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114617439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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