Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0017
James B. Haile
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.
理查德·赖特是一位非裔美国作家，传统上是在美国(和西方)文学现实主义框架下阅读的。不过，围绕他后来的俳句自然写作的学术研究越来越多。在这一学术研究中，学者们对他的政治思想如何影响他对日本俳句形式的改编进行了理论化。无论是传统的还是新兴的，很少有学者关注他后期俳句中出现的“自然思维”在他早期、中期和晚期的写作中已经出现的方式。但是，更重要的是，很少有学术关注他的自然思维对他的“文学现实主义”发展的形成方式。James B. Haile III的这一章不仅在他的散文中展示了“自然思维”与政治之间的联系，而且还论证了赖特本人既参与了美国黑人自然写作的发展，又对其形成了影响。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0002
R. Wright
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.
理查德·赖特(Richard Wright)的《我见过黑手》(I Have Seen Black Hands)为激进政治的第一部分定下了基调。赖特描述了和他一样的黑色双手，描述了他们对生命的渴望。这双手为他人创造了财富，并通过服兵役为国家服务。然而，当经济潮流转向时，非洲裔美国人却没有有偿工作或劳动报酬。更重要的是，当他们寻求分享他们为他人创造的利润时，他们会面临不公平的惩罚或私刑。这首诗的高潮是呼吁他们的手变成反抗的拳头，其他非黑人工人也加入进来。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0009
T. Curry
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.
汤米·j·库里(Tommy J. Curry)从黑人男性容易受到白人男性和白人女性的性暴力这一历史现实的角度来考虑赖特的性别观点。柯里探讨了赖特对1951年密西西比州同胞威利·麦基的审判和处决的慷慨激昂的回应。麦基被指控强奸了一名白人妇女，威廉斯塔·霍金斯，这名妇女被描述为他的情妇，但事实上，这名妇女威胁说，如果他拒绝她的求爱，她就会哭着强奸他。库里报告说，在那个时候，黑人常常出于经济需要，有时会被诬告强奸的威胁而被迫发生性关系。否则，他们就会被直接或间接地处以私刑。库里以一种赖特研究中前所未有的方式，将赖特的《全能之人》(The Man of All Work)描绘成麦基被强奸的寓言。在这个故事中，一个黑人男子为了找一份家务工作而变装。这导致了白人的一系列误解和误认，几乎要了他的命。库里总结道，这个故事远不止是一个巧妙的情节:它有效地表达了黑人所面临的一系列特殊的羞辱和困境。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0007
F. Hayes
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.
弗洛伊德·w·海斯三世(Floyd W. Hayes III)在这一章的开头提出，除了赖特《明亮与晨星》(Bright and Morning Star)中的苏姨妈(Aunt Sue)形象，赖特以男性为中心的叙事经常把女性角色视为男性主导世界中的对象或道具，用来解释主角的处境，而不是她们自己的处境。海耶斯认为，对赖特来说，黑人女性的身份被打上了落魄的烙印。而且，由于黑人妇女深受无法满足的饥饿和长期的阳痿之苦，她们反过来又参与了黑人儿子的发育不良。海斯总结道，赖特对异化是如何通过厌女症和性别歧视以及与无家可归的男性角色的关系来表达的看法，限制了他对黑人斗争的看法。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0005
C. E. Zirakzadeh
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.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0004
C. Robinson
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.
塞德里克·j·罗宾逊(Cedric J. Robinson)之前发表的文章讨论了赖特的艺术是如何表达现代的恐怖和可能性的。根据罗宾逊的说法，赖特对文学形式的选择使他能够比传统的历史、传记或政治小册子写作更真实地探索激进政治的复杂性和微妙之处。赖特通过小说将生活意识与社会理论和意识形态直接对立起来。赖特认为马克思主义的家长式意识形态是为无产阶级(尤其是黑人)而存在的，他想利用现有的民间传说来表达黑人深刻而复杂的意识。罗宾逊认为，对于美国共产党来说，要兑现其作为反法西斯主义最大保障的承诺，它必须更充分地接受法西斯主义在工人阶级中的吸引力。赖特的艺术试图解释这种令人不安的现象。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0008
P. Gilroy
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.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0020
L. Grattan
This chapter by Laura Grattan offers an alternative to critics and admirers who equate Wright’s resistance to white supremacy and capitalism with either ressentiment or violence. Drawing on Native Son, Black Boy, and 12 Million Black Voices, the essay argues that Wright constructs a multifaceted politics of refusal that puts the regeneration of the body and its aesthetic senses at the center of struggles to create “new and strange way[s] of life.” Individual and collective transformation entails repertories of refusal that lessen attunement to an antiblack social order and that make possible generative practices necessary for freedom. The essay concludes by evaluating the creative potential of refusal in movements to abolish policing and prisons.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0021
J. Gordon
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.
简·安娜·戈登(Jane Anna Gordon)认为，赖特在强调种族化奴役的经济遗产的同时，也探讨了奴隶制自正式废除以来一直存在的三个特征:(1)被奴役者的责任与他们受到惩罚的责任之间缺乏关系;(2)“两族鏖战”的传统;(3)对待黑人就好像他们没有亲属一样。根据赖特的说法，尽管奴隶的非黑人后裔可以说已经摆脱了他们祖先的历史，但这种自由对于非洲裔社区来说仍然是难以捉摸的。对大多数黑人来说，“后奴隶制”是一场旷日持久的种族化新奴隶制。公众对奴隶制语法的延续普遍感到尴尬，但并没有承诺真正根除奴隶制。因此，即使赖特自己能够从美国的不自由中偷走自己，这也没有达到他对自由的规范理想。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0010
R. Wright
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.
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