ABSTRACTS OF CONFERENCE PAPERS

Sarita Cannon
San Francisco State University

"Engaging Heads and Hearts:Teaching Richard Wright at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century"

In this paper, I discuss my experiences teaching the works of Richard Wright at San Francisco State University, an ethnically, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse urban school with a student population of 30,000. Using feedback from students who have taken classes with me in which I taught Native Son, I examine this novel’s significance in the intellectual and emotional lives of my students. I also discuss how Wright’s 1940 novel makes me reexamine and rearticulate my own pedagogy, which is deeply influenced by the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks. In particular, teaching and reading Native Son allows me to question the traditional dichotomy between the political and the aesthetic and to call attention to the potentially dehumanizing effects of separating one’s intellectual response to a text from one’s emotional response to a text.

Maria Luísa Branco
Universidade da Beira Interior

”Towards a Pedagogical Reading of Richard Wright’s Autobiographical Black Boy”

This paper is a pedagogical reading of Richard’s Wright autobiographical Black Boy, emphasizing its contribution to an education which fosters democratic values, namely equality and justice. I will also defend the pedagogical pertinence of this work, based upon Paulo Freire’s thought. In effect, Black Boy can be a path, in my perspective, to conscientization.

Sophia Emmanouilidou
Greek Ministry of Education

Liminalities of Space and Identity: Self-Conceptualization in Richard Wright’s “Rite of Passage” (1995)and “The Man who Lived Underground” (1996)
Richard Wright is notably one of the most widely celebrated writers in the canon of African-American literature mainly for the unique, outspoken and often blunt ways in which he lays bare the realities and entrapments of Black Americans in the 20th century. Yet, beyond the political, sociological and racialized readings of his work, Wright’s texts trigger in-depth and profound philosophical designations of the modern man as a metaphysical subject always and perpetually in transition. Nihilism, existentialism, post-structuralism and more recently transnationalism are just few of the philosophical undercurrents in Wright’s writing, particularly evident in the bulk of his expatriate writing phase in Paris. The aim of this paper is first to explore the hermeneutics of selfhood unravelled in two of Wright’s characters during their rite of passage to self-conceptualization, and second to delve into the liminal aspect of identity, as realized en route to esoteric understanding. Johnny Gibbs in “Rite of Passage” (1995) and Fred Daniels in “The Man who Lived Underground” (1996) juggle with the formulation of exilic/liminal spaces by withdrawing information from the public sphere but also by retrieving elements from their inner processings of the vast world outside in order to devise new realities of living. The deployment of the notion of a mutable ‘space’ as both a material locality or interstice, and as an immaterial cultural, (inter)subjective trait of human interaction informs the present approach to Wright’s fiction, because it is at the dialectical seams between time (chronos) and space (topos) that the postmodern peripheral identity can articulate self-difference and then pursue the subversion of fossilized and inhumane modes of existence.

Esther Sánchez-Pardo González
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

"Resistance, Confession, Resignification: Richard Wright’s The Man who Lived Underground"

Before the 1980s, protest–oriented paradigms for reading dominated African–American studies. A literary work, even of a renowned black author risked intraracial censure if it failed to manifest the sociological factors of an oppressive black experience. At that time, critics and audiences all seemed tacitly to agree that such works, which focus on black characters without making their world totally dependent on the material and psychological consequences of a racist society, were not black enough, and consequently disregarded them. Several of Richard Wright’s novels confronted such marginalization. As a black leftist intellectual, well read in Marxism and existentialism, Wright would never compromise his own personal idea of freedom in his writings to the typical depiction of black social protest. In The Man who Lived Underground (1945), we are witness to Wright’s elaboration on how the social subject comes into being. We confront the following scenario: the subject is subordinated to norms, and the norms are subjectivating, thus a new form of social subject emerges, one that is always under surveillance and subjected to the law. After Fred Daniels, a young black man unjustly accused of murdering a woman, is forced into signing a confession, he escapes from the police by going underground into the sewer system beneath the city where a series of adventures leads him to self-knowledge and ultimately, death.This paper aims at exploring the idea that punishment precedes consciousness, in line with Nietzsche among other turn-of-the-century thinkers, together with Michel Foucault’s dictum that “Western man has become a confessing animal” (History of Sexuality 1990, 59). In The Man Who Lived Underground, Wright is probing the impasses of secular confession, specifically of legal confession, and the condition where his protagonist’s words bind him and even at a certain point paralyze his desire for resistance. The Man who Lived Underground also resonates with echoes of F. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), another narrative of and about confession, understood as a founding moment in the history of the subject and as a revelation of a shameful history out of which the subject is no longer innocent but rather emerges as subject to guilt. In Wright’s novella the importance of the questions of naming and identity are also crucial. It is emphasized by the fact that we have access to the name of the protagonist in its written form incorrect and with typos. This tellingly reveals that Fred is also excluded from speech, in a way that mimics the logical positivism of sociology or psychology. The ability to subvert a superstructure of power derives from the relation of speech to subjectivity. As Henry L. Gates has argued, the African–American practice of “Signifyin” is one historically rooted expression of this potentiality of language. In our story, Fred is weakened and puzzled by the question of his identity until he regains strength to go upground and confront his victimizers. And Wright is probably insinuating a split between meaning and being. He is probably pointing to the split of subjectivity deriving from signification that transforms non existence from the level of the imaginary, where it remains an attribute assigned by someone situated as the Other, to the level of the symbolic, where it signifies the freedom of the subject from its reduction to the biological, the social, or some combination thereof. When finally Fred makes his speech confronting the police, the possibility of his ultimate salvation from the guilt feelings that have been chasing him, he is killed. Falling to a level beneath the “underground,” we are now made aware this expresses Fred’s knowledge of the sign –death– and of another level of the sign, one that is in a certain sense, beneath the surface, at the level of the signifier.In his classical essay, “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition,” Henry Louis Gates quotes a question posed by Sartre –“To whom does Richard Wright address himself?”– in order to redirect it as a question for criticism. The question is, no doubt, fundamental, and we will try to approach it as an index of Wright’s texts complex politics of representation.

Ana Maria Fraile
Universidad de Salamanca

“Reading Native Son in the Context of the (African) American Jeremiad and American Exceptionalism”

The critical consensus established around the canon of Richard Wright’s thirteen published works has tended to divert the attention to either Wright’s particular brand of Black Nationalism or to his creation of “the Negro” as a metaphor of the modern—alienated, deracinated, and disoriented—Western man. Instead, this essay will attempt to analyze the novel’s engagement with American idealism from within the African American tradition which has, from its inception, both embraced and criticized American exceptionalism. Native Son continues holding a prominent position in both the American and the African American literary traditions because, I would like to contend, Wright inscribed the novel in the national cultural continuum of the American jeremiad, exploiting its rhetoric, symbolism and typology, rather than because the novel successfully combined the more international or universal tenets of Marxism, naturalism, or existentialism. The analysis stems from Wright, Ellison and Morrison’s coincident observations about the centrality of the Black experience in America, an experience that returns the image of the nation’s betrayal of its foundational principles, as well as it reflects the humanity of blacks and their legitimate claim to freedom and equality.

Jonathan A. Austad
Chadron State Collage

“To the Left of Wright: The Manifesto of the Communist Party's Influence on Richard Wright’s Native Son”

Analyzing Native Son in connection with Richard Wright’s personal life, it becomes clear that Native Son is based on Wright’s struggles with living in an oppressive society, and his vision for removing the current system. This presentation will examine the life of Richard Wright and his experiences with racial segregation and oppression, which lead him to attend meetings at the John Reed Club and join the Communist Party in 1934. Wright, familiar with Marxism, then uses The Manifesto of the Communist Party as a framework for writing Native Son (1940) to expose the hypocrisy within the American system, which professes freedom and equality but ensures oppression and injustice. This presentation will examine the common reference points between the Manifesto of the Communist Party and Native Son, examining the American society that creates inequality. It will center up the Daltons, who serve as a metaphor for the blindness within the current system, each trying to help Bigger in some way, but this help in turn harms him. Wright also reveals the powerlessness of the Communist Party in America. They too have good intentions but fail to bring about change. The Daltons and the Communist Party represent the numerous theories to counter this oppressive system, but such ideas maintain the existing structure. Through Native Son, Wright argues that in order to obtain equality, the existing structure needs to be destroyed. As with the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Native Son asserts that a new system, free from the existing forms of oppression, needs to be established.

Kalenda Eaton
Armstrong Atlantic State University

"Jumping up to get Beat Down?: Reflections on the Perils of Black Progress in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and Black Power"

This paper will examine the poignant and critical response Richard Wright gave to an era of progress in post-Independence Africa and postwar America. In Black Power, Wright serves as a travel writer documenting the progress of a Black nation. Throughout the text Wright critically responds to the government as well as the masses. In 12 Million Black Voices he documents the quest for freedom and success through his discussion of Southern migrants arriving in the American North, poor and disillusioned. As in Black Power, Wright criticizes the government (although this time the government is primarily white) and warns the masses against culpability. The question remains, what was the goal of each text? As Richard Wright stands as a model of the American Black literati, he tends to be revered for his personal history and the creation of "Bigger Thomas." This paper will include appreciation for his oeuvre, but more importantly it will provide an exploration of Wright's treatment of the Black subject relevant to his documentation of the perils of Black progress, globally.

James Peterson
Bucknell University

“Native Sons and the Roots of Rage: Discerning the Bigger Figures in Hip Hop Culture”

This essay explores the extraordinary literary reflections (i.e. mimesis) between various authorial narratives in Hip Hop Culture and the narrative exploits of Richard Wright’s classic characterization of Bigger Thomas. Revisiting the contested discussions of Wright’s protagonist crafted by various scholars, most notably James Baldwin (in “Alas, Poor Richard”) and Dr. Houston Baker (in Blues Ideology . . .), I suggest that several rappers/MCs in Hip Hop culture have assumed the alienation, violence, and urban angst so thoroughly rendered through Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Studies in Modernity as well as various other approaches to Richard Wright’s work tend to obscure the fact that Wright’s literary creations are essential for the black expressive urban realism that, in time, influences nearly all of the musical content in Hip Hop culture. Through a hermeneutical analysis of the lyrics of several towering figures in Hip Hop Culture (especially The Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Eminem, and 50 Cent), a 21st Century multivalent portrait of Bigger Thomas emerges, complete with real life rape/sexual assault cases, assault, murder, blatant misogyny, celebratory anti-social behavior and various other violent aspirations.
This intriguing mimetic relationship has yet to be explicated in literary criticism and/or literary studies and it may prove to be an essential bridge between the rich African American literary tradition and the burgeoning (and currently dominant) spoken word traditions in African American culture. Even a cursory assessment of the major critics (Baldwin & Baker) whose work will buttress this essay, reveals the extraordinary fervor in the debates over the import, significance and particularly, the representative nature (or lack thereof) of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. My analyses will extend these debates into the 21st century through discursive encounters with notions of representation within Hip Hop Culture.
Finally though, some consideration will be given to the socio-economic conditions that produce Bigger Figures both in the oeuvre of Richard Wright and in the lyrics and lives of his Hip-Hopographic counterparts.

Martha Satz
Southern Methodist University

“Retaining All the Jewels of the Soul: The Ongoing Dialogue Between Protest and Affirmation”

In 1974, June Jordan wrote regarding the critical reception of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, “We should take care so that we will lose none of the jewels of our soul. We must begin, now, to reject the white, either/or system of dividing the world into unnecessary conflict.” It would seem that both in their published work and their reviews of each other’s work, Wright and Hurston engaged in a contentious dispute about the truth of the “Negro character” and its historical perception by whites. Wright famously reviewing Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God remarked “ . . her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley.. . Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “the white folks: laugh. And Hurston, in turn, reviewing Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children claimed that his writing was bleak, negative, and ideological. She asked, “Where was his pride in the race?”Most controversially, Wright makes the pronouncement in Black Boy, refuting what he took to be the white conception that Negroes “led a passionate existence” writing, “I used to mull over the strange absence of kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man and how shallow was even our despair.” This state of affairs he took to be the most powerful indictment of white oppression. By criticizing the extant state of Negro culture, he eloquently condemned white racism. Yet, for Hurston, affirmation of black culture implicitly elegantly rebuked that racism.
The present essay undertakes to demonstrate the ways that contemporary criticism of these authors has on the one hand perpetuated this agonistic dispute, extending the debate into a feminist claim about the misogyny of Wright and on the other taking steps to reconcile the oppositions in the two writers’ stances.

Vaughn Rasberry
University of Chicago

"On Cosmopolitanism and the Postcolony: Rethinking Richard Wright on Culture”

Wright’s contemporaries typically argued that his estrangement from the U.S. scene and forays into European and Third World cosmopolitics tarnished his literary output in the 1950s, which seemed bereft of the celebrated “authenticity” marking the previous works. Fortunately, this distortion no longer holds sway, as recent scholarship has inaugurated a renewed discussion of the intersections of anticolonial politics, Cold War reconfigurations, European philosophical currents.
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of Wright’s long-neglected postwar writings is what we might call the question of “postcolonial culture,” which for Wright involved the relationship between the various precolonial cultures of Africa and Asia and the teleology of modernization he sought to impose upon them. At the 1956 Paris Congress Wright expressed his views on postcolonial culture with great delicacy: “Might not the vivid and beautiful culture that Senghor has described not been… a fifth column a corps of saboteurs and spies of Europe? Did [the ancestor cult] religion help the people to resist fiercely and hardily and hurl the Europeans out? I question the value of that culture in relationship to our future. I do not condemn it. But how can we use it?” In a climate where many in his audience were lobbying for the rehabilitation of aspects of precolonial African culture, Wright’s views must have been exceedingly difficult to announce. His position challenges what might be called a postcolonial ethic on the question of culture, which stresses the imperative of western aggressors to curb their cultures of domination, rather than the obligation of subaltern groups to join the historical tide of liberal democratic norms or, alternately, to adopt modernization schemes as a shield against western aggression.In many ways an exemplary cosmopolitan subject during the Cold War, Richard Wright located his intellectual concerns at the center of a truly global history and politics. In this paper, however, I will argue that Wright presents a model of cosmopolitanism based less on international alliances than on a confrontation with the question of the subaltern culture(s) of the colonized and the non-Western regimes of privacy marking the global anticolonial movement.

Linda Chavers
Harvard University

"Revolutions Under the Skin: The Literary Nationalism in Wright's Uncle Tom's Children"

"This essay focuses on the self-awareness borne from violence. The plot of this short story collection is that of how violence can produce stronger human beings -- even if that being meets his own death. In Uncle Tom's Children, written in 1938, the author Richard Wright pushed his black heroes from persecuted downtrodden to the agents of their own lives (even if that involved their own physical demise). In his essay "Blueprints for Negro Writing" Wright defines any action taken to achieve dynamic agency is inherently violent as the black individual must force his way through a strict binary superstructure set up against him. For the author, the oppressed minority cannot reach subjecthood without violent intervention. Black resistance writers such as David Walker in 1829 and the noted psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in 1961 wrote that resistance involves taking violence and throwing it back onto its original agents in order to achieve a post-racist/post colonial world. But in between Walker and Fanon stands Wright's suggestion that there are actually two stages to this process. Through his fiction Wright argues that before a collective cultural overthrew is possible the black self must essentially overthrow himself to achieve agency ­ because up to this point he/she has always been in a static state; agency cannot occur without a violence that begins on a local level. What deserves attention today is Wright's notion that for any kind of revolution dramatic or not, it cannot happen without a violent act on and by the single black body. The narratives in Uncle Tom's Children provide clear, direct portraits of the desperate choices African-Americans faced in the Jim Crow South and their ensuing consequences. In doing so he centers each of his stories around the most tragic of scenes: choosing to die rather than being killed." -- this is quite long but I figured it was better to give you more to cut if need be.

Sostene Massimo Zangari
University of Milan

”Modernism as language of community: Richard Wright’s Lawd Today”

Lawd Today, Richard Wright’s first and long-unpublished attempt at novel writing, portrays the community of uprooted African-American immigrants of the Chicago South Side ghetto using a narrative style inspired by modernism. Written in the early ’30 under the influence avant-garde figures such as Gertrude Stein, the book shows similarities with what ethnic writers of different backgrounds (Michael Gold, Henry Roth and Pietro Di Donato among others) were doing at the time. These writers rejected the traditional, Immigrant-to-American chronological narrations, focused on the individual and chronicling successive steps in his/her adaptation, as unfit to reproduce rhythms, sounds and spaces of life in ghettoes. Confronting a urban space which was fragmented along racial, social and cultural lines, they turned to experimental artists for finding innovative esthetic solutions. In particular, the adoption of modernist techniques provided the means to put together the random fragments of identities torn by a pre-immigration past and a urban present.
Lawd Today, following Jake Jackson, a postal worker, through one of his typical days, acquaints the reader with domestic violence, exploitation of cheap unskilled labor, survival of Southern superstitions and the fascination of consumer culture, factors that made up the fragmentary and problematic framework of African-American immigrants’ lives in the South Side. Dealing with the most commonplace aspects of life, detailing attitudes, inclinations, and aspirations, Wright was able not only to recount the protagonist’ struggle to carve a place for himself in the urban environment but also the collective drama of a whole community. Abandoning traditional narrative strategies in favour of a modernist style, Richard Wright, like other ethnic writers, found a new language to textualize the uprooted lives of immigrants.

Eleanor W. Traylor
Howard University

“Richard Wright and the Question of Genre”

This panel proposes to examine the way Richard Wright's fcition--particularly Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Lawd Today--intervenes to disturb traditional characterizations of genre and to anticipate contemporary theories of narratology and contemporary understandings of "post-modernism." Uncle Tom's Children, for instance, as a short story collection queries the mythological structure of the novel. Native Son troubles traditional notions of genre with its invocation of naturalism, existentialism, and Marxism. And Lawd Today redirects the traditional folk narrative. The panel will examine genre by interrogating texts that precede Wright to illuminate the ways his fiction redirects genre, and it will examine texts that follow Wright to illuminate the ways his fiction anticipates the post modernism idea, ultimately revealing the relation of post moderism to Africana sensibilities caught in the drama of settlement in the American metropolis.