Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International最新文献

{"title":"Adaptations of Richard Wright’s Works","authors":"Tara T. Green, Charles I. Nero","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906867","url":null,"abstract":"Adaptations of Richard Wright’s Works Tara T. Green (bio) and Charles I. Nero (bio) Not surprisingly, we begin at a hotel bar. On the evening before sessions at the 2019 College Language Association (CLA) conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, began, several of us gravitated toward one another to enjoy conversations that only we could at such an event. The “How have you been?” eventually shifted to “but have you seen the HBO adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son?” It was an inevitable subject, as part of this cluster of African American literature scholars included Jerry Ward, Tara T. Green, and Charles Nero. This was only the beginning. The following year, Green organized a panel discussion to present at CLA’s virtual gathering. Our panel, “Richard Wright’s Native Son: From Page to Screen,” was well attended and was followed by a lively discussion about the impact, influence, and value of adaptations of literature in general and African American literature in particular. Nero and Green would later agree that more scholarly attention should be given to the adaptations of Wright’s work, that of a writer of international acclaim whose most famous novel cannot or will not be forgotten. Native Son in the American Canon Wright’s popularity began to emerge with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Children. In fact, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt as a result of this work. Yet, Wright was not pleased with reviews of the work: “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.” The result was to produce the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, of his novel Native Son (1940). [End Page 1] Reviewers of the novel beckoned to readers, advancing the intrigue that emerged within the pages of the novel. Clifton Fadiman, in a rather lengthy review for The New Yorker, wrote in his opening line, “Richard Wright’s Native Son is the most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath.” To refute any statements that may have marginalized Wright from the American canon, Fadiman ends the first paragraph with a response to another critic, “True enough, and it is a remarkable novel no matter how much or how little melanin its author happens to have in his skin.”1 Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic would agree with Fadiman, but Cowley would touch on the level of discomfort that Wright not so gingerly probed and liberally explored in the novel. According to Cowley, unlike Steinbeck who “pitied” his characters, “Richard Wright, a Negro, was moved by wrongs he had suffered in his own person, and what he had to fear was a blind anger that might destroy the pity in him, making him hate any character whose skin was whiter that his own.”2 Whatever Wright’s inspiration, his was a novel that represented an experience that was intensely American, as noted by Ralph Ellison, who lauded the “‘artistic and social achievement of Native Son’ and the ‘Negro writer’s ability to create the consc","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135444894","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":"Redeeming Bigger Thomas: Rashid Johnson and Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Woke” Native Son","authors":"Charles I. Nero","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906874","url":null,"abstract":"Redeeming Bigger ThomasRashid Johnson and Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Woke” Native Son Charles I. Nero (bio) Rashid Johnson’s HBO production of Richard Wright’s Native Son is a “woke” adaptation of the classic novel. By “woke,” I refer to the use of the term as a metaphor for being alert and/or aware of systemic racism. The term “woke” became popular in African American culture at the end of the twentieth century as can be seen quite spectacularly in some of Spike Lee’s films, notably in his 1988 School Daze, set in Atlanta over homecoming weekend at the historically Black Mission College. The film presents gendered practices such as fraternity hazing, colorism, and hair texture bias as the fallout upon Black people of systemic racism. In Lee’s film, these practices result in acts of profound cruelty that African American students commit against each other, often for the sake of social mobility and in-group solidarity. The film ends at dawn on a Sunday morning when the film’s protagonist yells “Wake up!” while ringing the school’s antique bell to summon the college residents to the college’s quad. Once all have gathered, the protagonist breaks cinema’s “fourth wall,” to directly address the viewing audience by stating calmly “Wake Up!”1 The film insists that combating systemic and institutional racism, including its internalization by people of color, requires that one be “woke.” Rashid Johnson and the screenplay writer Suzan-Lori Parks use this idea of being woke in the adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son broadcast on HBO in 2019.2 Johnson and Parks use wokeness to redeem Bigger’s toxic masculinity in their adaptation of the novel. We recall that Wright’s Bigger Thomas is not likable or a character with whom a reader relates by any stretch of the imagination. Wright’s Bigger is violent, sadistic, and cruel. Bigger murders a white woman, and although it was not his intention to do so, he decides to dispose of the body by dismembering [End Page 99] it and putting the remains in a furnace. Upon realizing that he cannot take his African American girlfriend Bessie with him to escape the police, Bigger rapes her, smashes her head with a brick, and throws her barely living body through an airshaft onto the snow-covered ground. Because Bigger is such an unsavory character, your attention as a reader gravitates toward what produced him and his version of masculinity. His grim behavior causes the reader to ask themself, “How did Bigger come to exist?” Is this a character who has not known love and affection? What circumstances have led to someone so devoid of empathy? Of course, these are questions whose answers point to the novel as an example of “naturalism,” the literary movement begun in the late nineteenth century that argued that environment, social forces, and even heredity shaped the actions of a character. Wright’s Native Son is an example of naturalism with its unsparing attention to the details of Bigger’s impoverished environment, defined throug","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135444888","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":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906876","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135444899","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":"Revisioning Richard Wright’s Bessie","authors":"Tara T. Green","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906868","url":null,"abstract":"Revisioning Richard Wright’s Bessie Tara T. Green One of the most degraded, but potentially intriguing, characters in American literature is Bessie of Richard Wright’s classic novel, Native Son. The novel is set in Depression-era Chicago and features Bigger Thomas, the twenty-year-old African-American son of a single mother who lives with her two sons and daughter in a one-room, rat-infested tenement on the South Side. Bigger reluctantly takes a job as a driver for the Daltons, the white owners of the tenement. By the end of his first night in the position, he has killed the owner’s daughter, arguably by accident, and soon thereafter is chased down by the police and arrested. Bigger’s girlfriend is Bessie Mears, a working-class woman who becomes reluctantly intertwined in Bigger’s plot to extort money from the Daltons and is eventually raped and murdered by Bigger. My focus here will be on Bessie as a character who evolves through film adaptations and necessarily transcends the trap of the protest novel to embody optimism. While I note here that an Afro-pessimistic perspective can certainly be applied to Native Son, my intent is to offer an alternative reading. Yvonne Robinson Jones observes, “Wright has garnered a place in history by establishing his protagonist, Bigger, as the prototype, the archetype of the angry, rebellious, disenfranchised, dispossessed militant, and even revolutionary African-American male, too often victimized by a racially divided American society that historically has targeted African-American males via lynching, police brutality, and, in most recent years, racial profiling.”1 Wright’s Bigger follows that of the protest novel described by James Baldwin as the genre’s shortcoming: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”2 Baldwin’s condemnation is of Bigger’s acceptance of the “theology that denies him life” or perhaps his inability to define himself beyond the oppressor’s assessment of [End Page 18] his life as undeserving because he is Black. Tenets of Afro-pessimism intersect with, if not emerge from, the protest novel’s premise: Afro-pessimism scholar Frank Wilderson III reveals that “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.” Indeed, the violence inflicted on Bessie places her in the category of a non-human prop. Revisioning Native Son, then, becomes necessary for achieving the transcendence proposed by Baldwin. Inspired by a Black feminist lens, I want to expand Afro-optimism studies of Africa to analyze the trajectory of the adaptations of Wright’s novel. Afro-optimism strives to propose an idea where “representations of Africa in the present” are “positive” and “project a better future.” As such, this way of imag","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135445136","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":"Playwright Nambi Kelley Finds the Love: Adapting Richard Wright’s Native Son for the Stage","authors":"Tasha Hawthorne","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906875","url":null,"abstract":"Playwright Nambi Kelley Finds the LoveAdapting Richard Wright’s Native Son for the Stage Tasha Hawthorne (bio) This conversation was conducted via Zoom on Thursday, March 10, 2022. Playwright Nambi Kelley was in New York City, and I was in New Haven, Connecticut. These are edited excertps from the conversation. Hawthorne. So, I’ve read the play. It is provocative, it is thought provoking. It is many, many things. It’s pretty incredible. So, if you would just give me a sense of—walk me through your decisions. I have two questions: (1) your decision to embody—have W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, and then, (2) why Richard Wright, and why Native Son? Kelley. I’ll start with why Richard Wright? why Native Son? and then go on to the second question or the first question. I first discovered Native Son when I was probably about seven or eight years old. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago—part of my childhood. My mother had the book on a shelf, and I was looking for you know something to do because I . . . I have older brothers. They’re much older than me, and so you know . . .. They’re not much older than me now that we’re grown, but when we were kids, they were practically adults, even though they weren’t. So, I was left to my own devices a lot. So, I used to read a lot because I was that kid. And I opened it [the book], and well, first of all I took the book off the shelf because I recognized the writer’s name, because oddly, enough, we had read in school an excerpt from Black Boy. And I was like, “Oh, my God! That must be for me, Richard Wright. I know that name!” So, I pulled it, and I start reading it and you know it’s like, “Oh, my God!” [imitates crying]. [End Page 114] But as I started reading it, I kept reading it because I recognized the street names because it’s the same neighborhood that I spent part of my childhood in. “Oh, I know Cottage Grove,” you know. I know these streets. So that was kind of cool. I was like, “Oh, this is where I am.” And then I got shocked, and then my mother took the book because she caught me reading it. Hawthorne. Appropriately so. Kelley. And I never saw the book again until high school. But that was my intro to it, and I loved it. And it was one of those things, I probably didn’t understand. You know three-quarters of what I read because I was seven! But I loved it, and I loved Bigger. So cut to I’m a grown woman in Chicago and working with this theater company, and they came to me, and they said, “Nambi, would you like to adapt Native Son?” And I just said “Yes!” But then, I was like “Wait a minute, how much money are you going to pay me?” And I agree to it, and I was kind of scared of it, you know, just a little bit because “My God, I love this book and it’s so iconic. So, I just jumped in and so that’s why, Richard Wright. Richard Wright was given to me in whatever grade I was in at that time, whoever my teacher was at that time. At Doolittle West on 35th and King in Chicago. The school ","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135444891","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":"More Than a Black Rat Sonofab---- Animality in Defining Americanness and the Human in Nambi E. Kelley’s Native Son","authors":"DeLisa D. Hawkes","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906873","url":null,"abstract":"More Than a Black Rat Sonofab----Animality in Defining Americanness and the Human in Nambi E. Kelley’s Native Son DeLisa D. Hawkes (bio) Nambi E. Kelley’s 2016 stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son opens with what the playwright calls “A Biggerlogue.” Bigger Thomas has presumably already murdered Mary Dalton and now stands in the middle of the stage, soaking wet and shivering with the light shining only on his naked body, a gesture towards simultaneous feelings of isolation and spectacle. Observers hovering in the shadows study Bigger; their uninterrupted gazes paint his image for the audience. In contrast to a monologue, the “Biggerlogue” does not feature Bigger speaking. Instead, the voice of the Black Rat reveals a powerful statement: “We all got two minds. How we see them seeing us. How we see our own self. But how they see you take over on the inside. And when you look in the mirror—You only see what they tell you you is. A black rat sonofab----.”1 Bigger stares into a broken mirror, his reflection an animalesque personification of himself as a rodent. Bigger then opens his mouth only after the Black Rat speaks for him. Nevertheless, Bigger only stands there—naked, wet, and shivering—as if he has either been symbolically born or baptized. The lights black out, and the “Biggerlogue” ends. Countless scholars have offered analyses of Wright’s novel and have argued that it can be read as postcolonial,2 anti-gothic,3 or that it questions “not how one becomes a black man, but how (or if) a Negro becomes a man.”4 Some scholars have focused explicitly on Wright’s inclusion of a black rat at the novel’s beginning. For instance, Matthew Lambert argues that “Wright uses [a black rat] in his depiction of the African-American experience in cities during the 1930s in order to critique racism and unfair housing conditions.”5 I argue that the [End Page 83] humanesque Black Rat in Kelley’s stage adaptation interrogates the centrality of animality—the concept of inherent animal nature—to the process of defining human, man, and other with attention to a white supremacist US cultural context. In this way, I read Kelley’s Native Son through an anti-colonial lens, paying attention to how power structures insist upon supposed human and animal nature to establish social and racial hierarchies. In conversation with Toni Morrison’s concept of an “Africanist presence” in American literature and Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of the figure of Man, I contend that Bigger and the Black Rat’s relationship in Kelley’s Native Son represents the centrality of animality in defining Americanness and its reliance on racialized others. While Wynter describes “The Millennium of Man” as the period in which the West worked to invent the idea of Man equated with the “white, bourgeois, heterosexual male,” which resulted in the belief that “to be not-Man is to be not-quite-human,”6 Morrison explains that “the rights of man [as] an organizing principle upon which the n","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135445511","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’s Huntresses: A Transgenerational Experience","authors":"Julia Wright","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906869","url":null,"abstract":"Richard Wright’s HuntressesA Transgenerational Experience Julia Wright (bio) On April 15, 1942, my mother, Ellen Wright, a daughter of Polish Jewish parents, went into postpartum depression because hardly had the administered chloroform worn off, when she overheard a white nurse on the Brooklyn hospital maternity ward say, “Who is the motherfucker who gave birth to a Black bastard?” In a state of shock, she could neither feed nor bond with me. My father, Richard Wright, literally pounced on me, would not let anybody come close, and rented a private room in the hospital. He placed two of his Black buddies at the door as security guards and proceeded to feed me my first baby bottle. While Ellen recovered, Richard was the one who mothered me. After my parents’ death, I stumbled on the story told by one of those my father had chosen to guard the private room’s door—but the experience fits with an unspoken, indelible image imprinted on my relationship with the world and others. The fact that so soon after my birth I was fiercely mothered by the Black man who was my father is woven into intergenerational threads I now pull through Richard’s own relationship with his mother and other women who were in caring relationships towards him during his formative years. Sometimes those threads knot up or break—they are never linear. Three Black matriarchal figures stand out: Ella, Richard’s biological mother; Aunt Maggie, who was Ella’s trusted sister and Richard’s favorite aunt; and the dominating matriarch, Grandma Wilson, who was both Ella and Maggie’s mother. When, on that April day of my birth, Richard held me up and away from the racism of the white nurses, he breathed into me the indomitable spirit of those three Black women he had internalized. [End Page 31] They stand out now: Ella, so demure, so fragile, who always quietly and unobtrusively encouraged Richard’s creativity while having to teach him the boundaries of death-bound Jim Crow and having to beat that survival lesson into him; Grandma Wilson, the iconic and towering figure of the recently published essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” who taught him how his own language sounded from the outside, its Black beat that he could translate into words;1 Aunt Maggie, who survived her lynched husband. These three heroines surfaced in varying aboveground and underground ways in Richard’s writings and in between his books. Ella, the schoolteacher, was so sensitive she reacted to both the brutal abuse and desertion of her sharecropper husband, Nathan, and to the impact of racial segregation in the Delta by experiencing crippling lifelong strokes that may well have been psychosomatic. But she was also in charge of corporal punishment, whipping, slapping, letting her sons know the boundaries of a segregationist world. She recognized her elder son’s gift, but she had to armor the tenderness Richard craved. He went hungry affectively as well as biologically, and his feelings towards Ella may have been deeply am","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135445142","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":"Uncle Tom’s Daughter: Sarah versus the Enduring Misogyny of Wright’s “Long Black Song”","authors":"Sondra Bickham Washington","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906870","url":null,"abstract":"Uncle Tom’s DaughterSarah versus the Enduring Misogyny of Wright’s “Long Black Song” Sondra Bickham Washington (bio) Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic. —Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning Richard Wright begins his 1938 collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, with an epi-graph declaring the death of the eponymous “cringing type who knew his place before white folk.”1 Because this brief manifesto is “a new word from another generation,” Wright immediately primes his readers for depictions of African Americans who resist the age-old constraints and oppressions of enslavement, racism, poverty, and Jim Crow life, and largely, he fulfills this commitment. Yet, Wright’s declaration falls short because he imagines Uncle Tom’s children, at least those purposely or fortuitously integral to resistance and racial progress, as a purely patriarchal lineage. Even when he attempts to add depth to his female characters, such as Sarah in “Long Black Song,” who contemplates her life, daydreams about alternate realities, and appreciates her sexuality, all of which suggests a progressive representation of a Black woman, Wright still limits her capacity to lead change. Thus, Wright’s patriarchal strategy is apparent and detrimental to the larger idea of Uncle Tom’s revolutionary children despite the many other examples of radicalism in his collection.2 Rather than empowering women, Wright’s phallocentric leanings underestimate the ability and necessity of Uncle Tom’s daughters to contribute productively to the resistance and activism of younger generations and minimizes their complex lives.3 Considering Wright’s tremendous contributions to the African American literary canon [End Page 35] and his towering influence in literature and cultural studies, Sarah’s story is an opportunity and outlet for devising the gender and race-specific resistance of a Black woman facing multiple simultaneous oppressions in the Jim Crow South. Nevertheless, Wright defaults to the timeworn misogynistic representation of the sexually promiscuous jezebel. Not only does such a flattened characterization fall into a timeless trope that minimizes Sarah’s agency and power, it also justifies and extends the tradition of misrepresenting and belittling Black women and deeming them one of Black men’s problems. As a literary giant, Wright’s depiction of Sarah, Silas, and the couple’s predominant marital issues—her supposed disloyalty and infidelity—is impactful and enduring, apparently even more so than the racism and white violence they experience. It is so influential that sixty years after the novella’s publication, director Kevin Rodney Sullivan, producer Danny Glover, and screenwriters Ron Stacker Thompson and Ashley Tyler seemed to have internalized and exaggerated Wright’s perspective to misogynoir4 in their 1996 HBO adaptation of “Long Black Song.” Although Wright and the filmmakers fashion works that feign sincere consideration of a Black woman an","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135445505","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":"“This Is a Man’s World”: Richard Wright Just Won’t Give a Sistah a Break in “Long Black Song”","authors":"Neal A. Lester","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906871","url":null,"abstract":"“This Is a Man’s World”1Richard Wright Just Won’t Give a Sistah a Break in “Long Black Song” Neal A. Lester (bio) Introduction In much of his work, Richard Wright is trapped in a time and polemical mindset concerned primarily with the lived experiences of Black men struggling against a system created and controlled by white men. This view of white supremacy as a struggle between Black and white men is on vivid display in his short story “Long Black Song,” from Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)2—the tale of a sexual encounter between a young Black mother and farmer’s wife, Sarah, and an unnamed white traveling salesman, and the results of this indiscretion. When husband Silas returns home from business in town and discovers the marital infidelity, he begins whipping Sarah and kills the white man. This essay explores the extent to which Wright’s short story and the HBO short film based on this story mis-characterize Sarah as the source of Silas’s death and downfall, and by extension, reveal the ways in which Black women, according to Wright, have no leading role to play in Black liberation from US racism. Contextually, my perspective derives from over thirty years of teaching this short story—and others in this collection of stories—to undergraduate literature students at two different universities who are, like myself, consistently confused and disappointed by Wright’s poor treatment of Sarah, in both the print and filmic formats. Such class discussions of Wright’s presentation of Sarah make for fertile critiques of patriarchy, feminism, Black liberation, race, gender, sex, and violence. More specifically, my teaching of “Long Black Song” comes after having studied other stories in Uncle Tom’s Children—“The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937), “Big [End Page 50] Boy Leaves Home” (1936), and “Down by the Riverside” (1938)—that all unapologetically center Black male experiences and marginalize Black women as a metaphorical drag on Black liberation and Black revolutionary leadership.3 While a more nuanced reading of this story would hold Silas accountable for his toxic masculinity, Wright undermines Sarah to uplift Silas, who dies allegedly protecting his property and avenging all that white people have taken from him. He rises to martyrdom because he is doing what real Black men stereotypically do—wage war against the alleged source of his and his community’s racial oppression, the white Man. My students and I ponder why neither Silas nor Sarah neatly qualifies as Wright’s philosophical and critical mouthpiece. While both are flawed characters, Wright seems to excuse, forgive, and even authorize Silas’s violent threats against Sarah and his killing of this white man, condoning Silas’s words and actions as justified, while Sarah is held entirely responsible for all that happens after her marital transgression. What emerges uncontested in student discussions is that Wright’s attention to this Black female character is deeply problematic, attention hinging pri","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135445131","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":"Bigger and Bessie on Nambi E. Kelley’s Stage: Adapting Native Son ’s Genre and Gender for the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Florian Bousquet","doi":"10.1353/pal.2023.a906872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2023.a906872","url":null,"abstract":"Bigger and Bessie on Nambi E. Kelley’s StageAdapting Native Son’s Genre and Gender for the Twenty-First Century Florian Bousquet (bio) When, in the final line of her poem “Black Art Now,”1 Nambi E. Kelley claims “I AM NOT NEW,” something about the literary lineage to which she feels indebted is revealed. As is clear from the intertextual foregrounding of their titles, Kelley’s plays are as much concerned with the African American literary tradition and the ancestors who “paved the way, kicked down doors, said what needed to be said”2 as with the present moment she inhabits. Dwelling on the adaptation process in an interview, Kelley conceived herself as being a “vessel” for the ancestors whose works or lives she remediates in stage form: “I try not to put myself on to it, just allow it and what it’s supposed to be, God, universe, spirit and those ancestors working through me, will work through me, I only have to decide what it is.”3 What the adapted or remediated work is through Kelley’s artistry is precisely what I want to interrogate in this essay, which focuses on her adaptation4 of Richard Wright’s Native Son and specifically addresses the playwriting challenges of adapting, in and for the twenty-first century, a novel problematic for its notoriously misogynistic treatment of women, Black and white. The product, I argue, is a complex experimental tragedy that answers to and negotiates the antagonistic constraints of “staying true”5 to Wright’s text while having it speak to contemporary audiences. By strategically and subversively rewriting its genre as well as the gender(ed) dynamics of the characters, Kelley participates in the revitalization of a novel, which, James Baldwin contended in 1951, “could not be written today.”6 [End Page 66] After it premiered in 2014 at Chicago’s Court Theatre in a co-production with the American Blues Theater with Seret Scott as director—the highest-grossing production in the theater’s sixty-year history—Nambi Kelley’s Native Son was performed in theaters across the United States, signaling contemporary audiences’ willingness to see this classic of African American literature on stage. Reacting to a staging of the play at the Antaeus Theatre Company in 2018 with Andi Chapman as director, artistic director Kitty Swink underlined the gender politics surrounding the novel’s dramatization, something commentators and reviewers of the play have failed to observe overall: “an adaptation by a woman, directed by a woman, of such a male world.”7 Dramatizations of Wright’s novel are not new, whether on stage or in film, but they have indeed been, until now, an exclusively male activity8 that have included Wright himself as writer of the first stage adaptation with Paul Green in 1941 and as actor playing Bigger’s part in Pierre Chenal’s 1951 film adaptation. Kelley’s play is therefore the creative product of a feminist re-reading and reshaping of Richard Wright’s novel. Cheryl Wall’s notion of “worrying the line,”9 which s","PeriodicalId":41105,"journal":{"name":"Palimpsest-A Journal on Women Gender and the Black International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135444892","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}