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As one of the most influential black writers of the twentieth century, Richard Wright paved a road on which he established the tradition of protest novels against whites and white society by employing naturalistic elements in his writing. His protest is especially directed toward whites that constructed social conditions and harsh environment for blacks. His fiction is based on his personal experience and he chooses to foreground the harsh environment and conditions in which blacks live. This environment plays an important role in shaping not only the black characters’ life but also the development of the plot of Wright’s fiction and stories. Instead of making his protagonist a victim as in traditional naturalism, though, Wright portrays the importance of humanity by evoking pathos and revealing the inhumanity of the whites.

This essay aims to explore the intertextuality between Toni Morrison’ Home and Richard Wright’s Native Son in terms of thematic approach and narrative strategy. In Native Son published in 1940, Wright depicts a story of a black male protagonist, Bigger Thomas, resisting on social injustice and inequality in the world of absolute dominance of white power. Morrison also delineates the black’s resistance on social injustice in Home published in 2012. In addition to their common thematic approach, they employs similar multi-layered narrative strategies such as a stream of consciousness technique, interior monologue, omniscient-author narrative, and italicizing or capitalizing text to depict their protagonist’s psyches. With these narrative skills, they embody the aesthetics of resistance. Consequently, Toni Morrison’s Home and Richard Wright’s Native Son have intertextuality in terms of the themes sublimating black’s resistance against social injustice and inequality into self-actualization as well as the forms employing multi-layered narrative strategies in their novels. In this regard, I argue that their works can be read to readers as the text of the aesthetics of resistance.

This study explores the double consciousness represented in the two novels, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. By the works, the writers understood education in North America as part of the project of capitalism, perpetuating the class structure necessary to maintain it. With the help of their novels, they deeply explores American educational frameworks and characters’ double consciousness caused by the absurd system of education. In order to achieve emancipation education within the context of vast diversity and individual potentialities, the writers strongly claim and ask as follows. What do we mean when we say “democracy”? If a democracy is to be inclusive of all the voices in its realm, do our schools support this? How can we emancipate ourselves from our history of not making good on the promise of equality and freedom for all people? As an alternative for democratic education, they strongly suggest that we should develop empathy and a political commitment to overcome the double consciousness which means not only a split between irreconcilable national and cultural identities, but also a split between the mind and the body. Emancipation education for overcoming the double-consciousness is rigorous. It needs to acknowledge multiple meanings. However, having one answer and one interpretation shuts too many people out. If we teach empathy, the critical and moral imagination can transform identity.

Blacks demanded increasingly realistic screen images. As the works of black writers realized the black experience more fully and more sympathetically, flimmakers looked to that literature as the basis for their productions. When black novels, however, were adapted as motion pictures, they were often reworked for mainstream audiences so that much of their cultural and idiosyncratic importance was lost and/or downsized. Native Son, Richard Wright’s most distinguished work, was adapted into film twice, by Pierre Chenal in 1951 and by Jerrold Freedman in 1986. The film in 1951 suffered from many of the problems that the early independent black films did. And Freedman’s film did the same mistake. This shows how hard the black films and/or the films in general free from the multiple layers of Hollywood’s commercial net.

Richard Wright's Native Son begins and ends with death. In the opening scene Bigger Thoma kills a big rat in the kitchenette living with his mom and his siblings. The rat is a symbol of the living conditions of urban black people and a foreshadowing metaphor for Bigger's fate. Bigger is incapable of nonracial thinking because of his obsession with his own black skin. He thinks and acts with aggressions and atrocities as a way of getting out of racial pain or escaping all the negatives in his life. Bigger's ultimate act of violence is to cut off Mary's head. Bigger's defamation of Mary's dead body represents the deconstruction of body as a biological device of racial segregation. Mary's head in his nightmare which Bigger hacked off is a reflection of his own head. The substitution of his head for Mary's means the possibility of interchangeability between subject and object, murderer and murdered, oppressor and oppressed. After he kills Mary he thinks his murder is an act of creation. The fear and shame and hate which white people make rise so hard and hot in Bigger have cooled and softened. (Chung-Ang University)

This paper examines the interface that splits apart yet at the same time links Native Son and Native Speaker, which unmistakably parallel each other in genre and theme in addition to their titular ties. In the first half of this Native Son/Native Speaker study, I investigate the complex and nuanced gap between the two texts, especially in relation to the matter of the unauthorized nativeness in white America, and also the direct clashes between Koreans and African Americans in the 1992 LA riots. In order to bridge the apparent gap between the two non-white minority groups, in the second half of this intertextuality study, I explore the unarticulated intersection of the African-Korean American texts by addressing self-effacement, the distinct feature shared by the subject formation of Green and Henry Park who appear, respectively, as a marginal African American character in Native Son and as a Korean American protagonist in Native Speaker. The main focus of this part is to examine the specific ways in which white surveillance culture exerts substantial influence on the distinct mode of the non-white subject formation, the correlation between surveillance culture and identity in a racially contextualized American society, so to speak. This Native Son/Native Speaker study thereby aims to contribute to a field of Afro-Asian intersection scholarship that is insufficient, compared to other cross-racial intersection scholarship within the field of American literary studies.

This study explores the double consciousness represented in the two novels, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. By the works, the writers understood education in North America as part of the project of capitalism, perpetuating the class structure necessary to maintain it. With the help of their novels, they deeply explores American educational frameworks and characters’ double consciousness caused by the absurd system of education. In order to achieve emancipation education within the context of vast diversity and individual potentialities, the writers strongly claim and ask as follows. What do we mean when we say “democracy”? If a democracy is to be inclusive of all the voices in its realm, do our schools support this? How can we emancipate ourselves from our history of not making good on the promise of equality and freedom for all people? As an alternative for democratic education, they strongly suggest that we should develop empathy and a political commitment to overcome the double consciousness which means not only a split between irreconcilable national and cultural identities, but also a split between the mind and the body. Emancipation education for overcoming the double-consciousness is rigorous. It needs to acknowledge multiple meanings. However, having one answer and one interpretation shuts too many people out. If we teach empathy, the critical and moral imagination can transform identity.

Scholarship on Richard Wright’s ?Native Son? has accepted the work differently. Some critics such as Irving Howe have read the novel as the reflection of Wright’s personal feelings. However, others have interpreted the novel as the warning of the devastating effects of racism. Focusing on the latter position, I point out one important aspect of the novel. That is, Wright shows whiteness through presenting the interconnection of space and race construction during the 1930s. Although racialized space set by Jim Crow laws was very pivotal in sustaining the racial hierarchy in the South at that time, it was formed in the North as well through different ways. That is, unlike the South, the North constructed racialized space customarily via racially restrictive covenants. What is remarkable is that Wright uncovers that whiteness created racialized space de facto in the North, which ultimately demonstrates that racialized space for white power and privilege was practiced during the Jim Crow era both in the North and in the South. In addition, through Bigger Wright portrays black subjectivity realistically facing the racial oppression in the raced space. Finally, I demonstrate that the novel shows that space is not just a physical place; a human body can be read as space. In sum, I demonstrate that Wright shows that racialized space was not confined to the South; it was a nation-wide phenomenon during the Jim Crow period; for whites, racialized space is not only for economic profits but also for the protection of white identity.

This paper explores Richard Wright’s portrayal of emotion and knowledge in Native Son, focusing on the character of Bigger Thomas and the complex ways Wright evokes visceral, embodied responses from readers. Wright deliberately crafts Bigger as a character who resists sentimental identification, using a language of sensory resonance that bridges bodily feelings and cognition. Through this, Wright reveals that certain truths about race, identity, and humanity can only be fully understood through felt, embodied experiences. By rejecting the use of simplistic sympathy, Wright’s Native Son instead confronts readers with the harsh emotional realities of racial oppression. This paper argues that Wright employs a form of emotional and bodily knowledge, demonstrating how emotional suppression, physical tension, and epistemological uncertainty intertwine in Bigger’s life. Ultimately, the analysis reveals how Wright’s aesthetic ambition is not only to engage readers emotionally but also to critique the sociopolitical structures that shape the emotional lives of marginalized individuals.

This article explores James Baldwin’s engagement with the generic possibilities of the essay. Theodore W. Adorno’s theorization of the essay is utilized to examine how Baldwin exploits the formal possibilities offered by the genre. In “Autobiographical Notes,” Baldwin wrests space for reflection and analysis by maximizing the essay’s antisystemic impulse. The essay as form provides Baldwin with the method necessary to counter the objectifying force of race. Baldwin furthermore merges the essay with the African American aesthetic of the cut. It is this aesthetic tradition that sensitizes Baldwin to the tension between notes and gaps, articulation and implication. This can be most clearly observed in the Paris essays. Each essay is written from a different identity position, but instead of resolving the tension created by the four essays, Baldwin demands that the readers hold multiple elements in mind. An investigation of Baldwin’s art reveals him to be a true master of the essay form, an inheritor and an innovator of the genre.

The issue of surveillance deserves special attention as an intrinsic component of African American history―spanning from the time that slaves were brought to the Americas on ships to the current concerns over US police repression against black people. Drawing on an analysis of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) as a representative literary work on surveillance, this paper examines how white surveillance serves to undermine black subjectivity and freedom, operating as the omnipresent external control over black people in the racially segregated sociocultural topography of Jim Crow. Because of white surveillance at enforcing upon black people the Jim Crow regulations, almost all sectors of American life have been transformed into a virtual prison for black people. This paper thus focuses on the panoptic mechanism of white surveillance, which confines black people within the ever-present vigilant white gaze that serves to not only keep them from encroaching on white properties and predominantly white areas, but also to find any presumptive evidence of black offenses. Under the panoptic regime of racially identifying gaze, black people are already framed as potential criminals simply because of their blackness, and thus they are habitually targeted as the most suspicious suspects of crimes such as rape and robbery. In this way, the white gaze toward blacks entails a certain ideological framework in which black people are naturally seen as possible offenders who warrant the scrutiny of white people.

This essay explores Native Son with a particular concern with Wright’s depictions of the relationships between Bigger Thomas and Jan Erlone. Prevailing criticism has long seen Bigger as a symbol of racial anger or as a man incapable of relations with others. But I challenge such criticism, arguing that Bigger becomes a person not through Mary’s murder, but through the human solidarity he has achieved with Jan. I look closely into the three pivotal encounters between Bigger and Jan: Jan’s initial blunder of approaching Bigger on a superficial level of Communist comradeship in “Fear”; Bigger’s guilt-driven threatening of Jan with a gun in an attempt to implicate him with Mary’s murder in “Flight”; and Jan’s last visit to Bigger’s cell to offer his forgiveness and reconciliation in “Fate.” The examination will show that Bigger’s acceptance of Jan’s friendship at the end of the novel is not an unmotivated or improvised event prompted by the self-abandoned murderer waiting to be executed in the electric chair, as many critics have inappropriately asserted, but a product thoroughly “earned” by Bigger and Jan going through sufficient conflicts, conversion, and growth. This mutual process also distinguishes Jan from Max, especially when Max begins to see Bigger as a social symbol during the trials and ultimately fails to understand him as an individual human being. Indeed, the friendship Bigger and Jan have established together upon understanding, shared humanity, reciprocity, and forgiveness and reconciliation remains at the novel’s end, and I will discuss its meaning in light of Wright’s vision of American race relations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Richard Wright’s Native Son and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. These two novels have been commonly known as Bildungsroman in which the main characters experience racial conflict and find their identities through mental or emotional transformation obtained in their relationships with the surrounding society. Through their work, Richard Wright has revealed the tragic problems of racial discrimination caused by White community and explored the hardships which African-Americans had suffered in many ways, exposing the negative consequences of the discrimination to the public. If two previous novels by black writers concentrated on shedding light on the negative effects and destructive aspects caused by racial prejudice, such as the impossibility of identity building and of identity searching, during the time when racism was more overt and systematic, Chang-rae Lee’s novel has excluded many elements of racial discrimination based on skin color throughout the story. The precedent studies on these works, as above, have focused on the problems of identity experienced by people of color and immigrants: the ‘absence’ of humanity, the ‘exclusion’ from society, and the challenge of finding identity shown by the cultural ‘hybridity’.

Kim, Jeongho. “Native Son Goes to Hollywood: A Study of Racism in American Films--through Adaptation from a Novel and a Play.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 32.3(2006): 61-83. Blacks demanded increasingly realistic screen images. As the works of black writers realized the black experience more fully and more sympathetically, flimmakers looked to that literature as the basis for their productions. When black novels, however, were adapted as motion pictures, they were often reworked for mainstream audiences so that much of their cultural and idiosyncratic importance was lost and/or downsized. Native Son, Richard Wright’s most distinguished work, was adapted into film twice, by Pierre Chenal in 1951 and by Jerrold Freedman in 1986. The film in 1951 suffered from many of the problems that the early independent black films did. And Freedman’s film did the same mistake. This shows how hard the black films and/or the films in general free from the multiple layers of Hollywood’s commercial net. (Chonbuk National University)

This thesis analyzes signs of the author’s negative attitude toward women, by examining the main characters’ identities and limitations in Richard Wright’s Native Son, one of the most famous novels of social protest, created a tidal wave of acclaim and made an indelible mark in the history of American literature. Against immense odds, Wright became America’s first best-selling black author, and his works have influenced generations of African-American writers and readers of all races. On one level, the character of Bigger Thomas can be interpreted, as he often has been, as a tragic or heroic figure who resists against white racism and achieves his self-consciousness. On another level, however, Bigger is a monster, a killer of two innocent women. He is alienated from his family, his gang, and the larger black and white community. Although Jan and Max are important to Bigger and his acquiring of identity by nourishing his social self, they do not solve his problems, nor do they have the power to change American society. As the title states, Native Son is the story of a black man, not a black woman. Bigger Thomas, economically, psychologically, and socially emasculated, unleashes his rage against female characters. Through Bigger, Richard Wright struggles to appropriate and thus dehumanize women by reducing them to pawns in the midst of male status conflict. Therefore women as characters in Native Son, are mere objects of this appropriation; they are desired as objects, but at the same time, contemptible in their weakness and passivity. Religion, alcohol, and sex are black women’s reactive activities which are characteristics of their personalities. They are all content to nag rather than nurture, and they are effectively silenced by Bigger and the author. Paradoxically, the final attempts of the text to cover the repressed phallocentricity and to achieve some sort of rapprochement between Bigger and the white male society that oppresses him are somewhat strange against this backdrop of violence against women. It is now time to uncover and examine the author’s prejudices about women and to scrutinize the previously concealed misogyny in this pivotal work of American literature, shaped by the absent Other.

Richard Wright’s Native Son has long been read as a representative work of African-American protest writings, and the paradigms through which Bigger Thomas has been presented as a social symbol of racial anger, or as a prototype of the revolutionary black hero, seem to limit the possibilities of reading the novel otherwise. This paper attempts to find the meaning of Wright’s novel not in Bigger’s revolt and his clenched militancy toward whites, as many critics have insisted, but in the human solidarity that Bigger has established with Jan Erlone, despite the murderer-victim relation and more importantly, despite a long history of racial hostility between the black man and the white man. I look closely into the three pivotal encounters between Bigger and Jan as described in each section. The examination will show that Bigger’s acceptance of Jan’s friendship at the end of the novel is not an unmotivated or improvised event prompted by the self-abandoned murderer waiting to be executed and the devout Communist who is capable of suppressing personal grief for a higher ideological cause, but a product thoroughly ‘earned’ by Bigger and Jan going through sufficient conflicts, conversion, and growth.

This essay reads Richard Wright’s Native Son as counter-lynching narrative in which he reasserts black manhood and represents the symbolic interracial working-class male bond by relegating black and white women to conduits of exchange between men, black and white. Reflective of the destruction of interracial working-class solidarity in the early twentieth-century United States, Native Son investigates the ways in which lynching narrative stigmatizes black male sexuality and offers its counter-lynching discourse. This essay addresses how the novel portrays black man as the universalized feature of racial oppression. By analyzing the protagonist Bigger‘s relationship with the white communist Jan, I contend that it is white and black women that function as the exchange objects over which white and black men can form a homosocial bond. This essay also explores misogyny and homophobia embedded in Wright’s portrayal of black manhood. Native Son renders the injurious effects of racism on black men as their feminization and homosexualization. My essay concludes that Wright’s text reinscribes masculine heteronormativity and marginalizes female and queer subjects.

Richard Wright's Native Son begins and ends with death. In the opening scene Bigger Thoma kills a big rat in the kitchenette living with his mom and his siblings. The rat is a symbol of the living conditions of urban black people and a foreshadowing metaphor for Bigger's fate. Bigger is incapable of nonracial thinking because of his obsession with his own black skin. He thinks and acts with aggressions and atrocities as a way of getting out of racial pain or escaping all the negatives in his life. Bigger's ultimate act of violence is to cut off Mary's head. Bigger's defamation of Mary's dead body represents the deconstruction of body as a biological device of racial segregation. Mary's head in his nightmare which Bigger hacked off is a reflection of his own head. The substitution of his head for Mary's means the possibility of interchangeability between subject and object, murderer and murdered, oppressor and oppressed. After he kills Mary he thinks his murder is an act of creation. The fear and shame and hate which white people make rise so hard and hot in Bigger have cooled and softened.

For many years, Native Son, one of Richard Wright’s major works, has been heavily attacked by some renowned literary critics because of its narrative inconsistency and thematic ambiguity, not to mention its graphic violence and suspected misogyny. Especially in “Fate,” the last section of the novel, the driving force of its narrative is weakening gradually amid its philosophical meditations and political manifestation, which leads eventually to its narrative inconsistency and thematic ambiguity. In this respect, many critics have attempted to explain these flaws in terms of Wright’s political leanings and philosophical confusion. In contrast to this consensus of the critics, this essay tries to figure out these deficiencies of the novel in terms of the dialectics between accident and necessity. The driving force of the narrative of Native Son comes from the dynamic interaction of the accidental events of Bigger Thomas, its protagonist, and the necessity of socio-historical forces in 1940s America in which the novel was born. By way of the dialectical confrontation between individual accidents and socio-historical necessities, the driving force of narrative in Native Son successfully portrays the totality of racial discrimination in the American society, as well as the existential meanings of Bigger’s life as a black man. However, from the last section of the novel, the dialectics of accident and necessity shatters into dogmatic discourses of politics and ambiguous monologues of philosophy, which results in undermining the driving force of the narrative in Native Son.

This essay focuses on the concept of time represented in Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Richard Wright’s Native Son in order to address the ways in which we perceive and represent time in these novels envisage the main theme of the two novels: the resistance against social discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, and ethnicity. As a member of a newly-arrived immigrant family, Antonia Shimerda struggles to establish her home in the new but barren territory of the American Midwest, fighting against the anti-immigrant prejudice of American Society. Likewise, Bigger Thomas also tries to overcome the racial discrimination of 1930s American society and to find out the meaning of his tragic and depressed life. In their resistance against the prejudice and discrimination of early twentieth-century American society, the perception of time works as a key role since both Antonia and Bigger use their memories and reminiscences as productive means of their resistance. Therefore, this essay discusses the creative power of memory and reminiscence from the overall perspective of Henri Bergson’s duration of time. At first, this research discusses the usage of the creative power of time by Antonia and Bigger in the novel in terms of Georg Lukacs’s “power of time.” Next, this study analyzes the resemblance between Deleuze’s idea of “time-image” and the images of time described in My Antonia and Native Son. Finally, this essay reviews the idea of time in those novels in light of Bergson’s idea of time as duration, relying on his discussion of time, matter, and image. This essay concludes that both Antonia and Bigger have recourse to the power of memory and reminiscences, empowered by the duration of time, for their resistance to social discrimination on the basis of gender, race, and ethnicity.