Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906867
Tara T. Green, Charles I. Nero
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
改编自理查德·赖特的作品塔拉·t·格林(传世)和查尔斯·尼禄(传世)毫不奇怪，我们从酒店的酒吧开始。在北卡罗来纳州罗利举行的2019年大学语言协会(CLA)会议开始的前一天晚上，我们几个人互相吸引，享受着只有我们才能在这样的活动中进行的对话。“你最近怎么样?”，最终变成了“但你看过HBO改编的理查德·赖特(Richard Wright)的《原住民之子》吗?”这是一个不可避免的话题，因为这群非裔美国文学学者中包括杰里·沃德、塔拉·t·格林和查尔斯·尼禄。这仅仅是个开始。第二年，格林在CLA的虚拟聚会上组织了一个小组讨论。我们的小组讨论“理查德·赖特的本土之子:从页面到屏幕”，参加人数很多，随后是一场关于文学改编的影响、影响和价值的热烈讨论，尤其是非裔美国文学。尼禄和格林后来一致认为，应该把更多的学术注意力放在赖特作品的改编上，赖特是一位享誉国际的作家，他最著名的小说不能也不会被遗忘。《汤姆叔叔的孩子们》一书出版后，赖特开始走红。事实上，由于这项工作，他获得了埃莉诺·罗斯福认可的古根海姆奖学金。然而，赖特对人们对这本书的评价并不满意:“我发现，我写的这本书，连银行家的女儿都能读到，看完会流泪，还会感觉良好。”其结果是产生了他的小说《土子》(1940)中的主人公，比格·托马斯。小说的评论家向读者招手，推进小说中出现的阴谋。克利夫顿·法迪曼(Clifton Fadiman)为《纽约客》撰写了一篇相当长的书评，开篇就写道:“理查德·赖特的《土生土长的儿子》是自《愤怒的葡萄》以来最具影响力的美国小说。”为了反驳任何可能将赖特从美国经典中边缘化的言论，法迪曼在第一段结束时回应了另一位评论家，“确实如此，无论作者的皮肤里碰巧有多少黑色素，这都是一部非凡的小说。”《新共和》(The New Republic)的马尔科姆·考利(Malcolm Cowley)赞同法迪曼的观点，但考利触及的不适程度是赖特在小说中没有那么谨慎地探索和自由地探索的。根据考利的说法，与斯坦贝克“同情”他的角色不同，“理查德·赖特，一个黑人，被他自己所遭受的错误所感动，他不得不担心的是一种盲目的愤怒，这种愤怒可能会摧毁他内心的怜悯，使他憎恨任何一个皮肤比他白的角色。”无论赖特的灵感来自哪里，正如拉尔夫·埃里森(Ralph Ellison)所指出的那样，他的小说代表了一种强烈的美国经历，他称赞“《土子》的艺术和社会成就”以及“黑人作家创造被压迫民族意识的能力”。关于这部小说的价值和作者的目的的争论仍在继续。作为一名“黑人作家”，赖特常被拿来与他之前的其他黑人作家作比较。赖特本人并不否认自己在这个杰出阶层中的地位，也不否认黑人写作的悠久传统，但他认为自己是一种反叛者。几年前，赖特曾发出呼吁:在他的《黑人文学蓝图》(Blueprint for Negro Literature)中，这位崭露头角的作家斥责早期的黑人作家成为“受过教育的黑人向美国白人祈求正义的声音”。相反，赖特提出黑人作家有“严肃的责任……”描绘黑人生活中各种错综复杂的关系。赖特在《汤姆叔叔的孩子们》中试图做到这一点，在《土儿子》中更是如此。阿兰·洛克将这部小说作为关于黑人艺术真实性的更大辩论的一部分。特别是关于《土子》，洛克写道:“它生动而重要的启示应该是唤醒社会意识的一个重要因素。“洛克和埃里森看到……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906874
Charles I. Nero
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
拉希德·约翰逊(Rashid Johnson)和苏珊·洛莉·帕克斯(susan - lori Parks)的《苏醒的》原著《查理一世》(Charles I. Nero)(传记)拉希德·约翰逊(Rashid Johnson)由HBO电视台制作，改编自理查德·赖特(Richard Wright)的《苏醒的》原著。所谓“觉醒”，我指的是用这个词来比喻警惕和/或意识到系统性的种族主义。“觉醒”这个词在20世纪末开始在非裔美国人文化中流行起来，这在斯派克·李的一些电影中可以看到，尤其是在他1988年的《校园迷情》中，故事发生在亚特兰大历史悠久的黑人使命学院的返校节周末。这部电影展示了诸如兄弟会欺侮、肤色歧视和发质偏见等性别行为，作为系统性种族主义对黑人的影响。在李安的电影中，这些做法导致非裔美国学生相互之间犯下了深刻的残酷行为，往往是为了社会流动性和群体内团结。电影在一个周日的黎明结束，电影的主角喊道:“醒醒!”一边按响学校的古色古香的钟，把学院的学生召集到学院的院子里。当所有人都聚集在一起时，主角打破了电影的“第四堵墙”，平静地对观众说:“醒醒!”这部电影坚持认为，与系统性和体制性的种族主义作斗争，包括有色人种对种族主义的内化，需要一个人“觉醒”。拉希德·约翰逊和编剧苏珊-洛里·帕克斯在2019年HBO播出的理查德·赖特的《土子》改编中使用了这种清醒的想法。约翰逊和帕克斯在改编小说中利用清醒来弥补比格的有毒男子气概。我们记得，赖特的《大托马斯》既不讨人喜欢，也不是一个读者可以通过想象与之产生联系的角色。赖特的《Bigger》充满了暴力、虐待和残忍。比格谋杀了一名白人女性，尽管这不是他的本意，但他还是决定肢解尸体，然后把尸体扔进炉子里。当他意识到他不能带着他的非裔美国女友贝西一起逃离警察时，Bigger强奸了她，用砖头打碎了她的头，并把她奄奄一息的身体扔进了一个通风井，扔在了白雪覆盖的地上。因为比格是一个如此令人讨厌的角色，作为读者，你的注意力会被吸引到是什么造就了他，以及他对男子气概的看法上。他冷酷的行为让读者不禁自问:“比格是怎么出现的?”这是一个不懂得爱和感情的人吗?是什么情况导致一个人如此缺乏同理心?当然，这些问题的答案指向小说作为“自然主义”的一个例子，“自然主义”是19世纪后期开始的文学运动，认为环境，社会力量，甚至遗传因素塑造了人物的行为。赖特的《本土之子》是自然主义的一个例子，它毫不吝啬地关注了比格的贫困环境的细节，通过缺乏的迹象来定义:一个缺席的父亲，一个对他的爱充满怀疑的母亲，四个人在一个狭窄的一室公寓里没有隐私，几乎没有向上流动的机会。所有这些缺失都表明，几乎没有任何教化工具可以弥补比格和他的男子气概表现。赖特的《土生土长的儿子》及其对比格的匮乏的有力描述，是对美国及其对白人至上主义的承诺的控诉。读者不会忘记，在比格的生活中，缺乏文明化的工具——家庭、爱情、就业和向上经济流动的前景——是白人至上主义的结果，这种优越感要求一个可支配的下层阶级。为了满足对廉价、不熟练劳动力的需求，美国将这一阶层种族化，让非洲裔美国人成为永久群体。赖特饰演的比格是文明的异类，所以他不适合约翰逊的“觉醒”改编。救赎比格需要他成为一个文明的社会成员。通过社会阶层的变化来实现更大的文明在电影中…
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906876
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906868
Tara T. Green
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
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906875
Tasha Hawthorne
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
剧作家南比·凯利找到了爱改编理查德·赖特的《土生土长的儿子》搬上舞台塔莎·霍桑(传记)这段对话是在2022年3月10日星期四通过Zoom进行的。剧作家Nambi Kelley在纽约，而我在康涅狄格州的纽黑文。以下是经过编辑的对话节选。霍桑。我读过剧本了。这是挑衅的，发人深省的。有很多很多东西。太不可思议了。所以，如果你能告诉我，告诉我你的决定。我有两个问题:(1)你决定体现杜波依斯的双重意识理论，然后，(2)为什么是理查德·赖特，为什么是本地人?凯利。我先说说为什么是理查德·赖特?为什么是本地人?然后回答第二个问题或第一个问题。我第一次发现《土子》大概是在我七八岁的时候。我在芝加哥南部长大，那是我童年的一部分。我妈妈把书放在书架上，我在找你知道的事情做，因为我…我有哥哥。他们比我大很多，所以你知道.. ..现在我们长大了，他们并不比我大多少，但当我们还是孩子的时候，他们实际上已经是成年人了，尽管他们还没有。所以，我就只能靠自己了。我曾经读过很多书，因为我就是那个孩子。我打开这本书，首先，我把书从书架上拿下来，因为我认出了作者的名字，因为奇怪的是，我们在学校读过《黑男孩》的一段摘录。我当时想，“哦，天哪!那一定是给我的，理查德·赖特。我知道这个名字!”所以，我把它拿出来，我开始读它，你知道的，就像，“哦，我的上帝!(模仿哭泣)。但当我开始读它的时候，我一直在读，因为我认出了街道的名字，因为这是我度过童年时光的同一街区。"哦，我知道Cottage Grove "你懂的。我熟悉这些街道。这很酷。我说，“哦，这就是我所在的地方。”然后我震惊了，然后我妈妈拿走了那本书，因为她发现我在读这本书。霍桑。这也是适当的。凯利。直到高中我才再次看到这本书。但这是我对它的介绍，我喜欢它。这是其中一件事，我可能不明白。你知道我七岁时读过的四分之三的书!但我喜欢它，我喜欢比格。所以切换到我是芝加哥的一个成年女性，在一家戏剧公司工作，他们来找我，他们说，“南比，你愿意改编《土子》吗?”我说:“是的!”但后来，我想“等一下，你打算付我多少钱?”我同意，我有点害怕，你知道，只是一点点，因为“我的上帝，我爱这本书，它是如此的标志性。所以，我就跳进去了，这就是为什么，理查德·赖特。不管我当时在哪个年级，不管我当时的老师是谁，理查德·赖特都是给我的。在芝加哥35街和国王街的Doolittle West。学校已经不在了，但它还在我心里。这就是为什么理查德·赖特，这就是为什么土著之子。这是别人给我的。这是一个循环往复的时刻。就杜波依斯双重意识理论的体现而言。我当时在纽约，我父亲是一位历史学家。我去了他在河滨大道的公寓。我不是和他一起长大的。我的意思是他一直在我的生活中，但我没有和他一起长大，但他是…
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906873
DeLisa D. Hawkes
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
不仅仅是一只黑鼠Sonofab----界定美国人和南比·e·凯利(Nambi E. Kelley)的《原住民之子》中的人类的动物性(DeLisa D. Hawkes)(传记)2016年，南比·e·凯利(Nambi E. Kelley)将理查德·赖特(Richard Wright) 1940年的小说《原住民之子》(Native Son)改编为舞舞剧，以剧作家所谓的“大独白”开场。比格·托马斯大概已经谋杀了玛丽·道尔顿，现在站在舞台中央，浑身湿透，浑身发抖，光只照在他赤裸的身体上，这是一种同时表达孤立感和壮观感的姿态。徘徊在阴影中的观察者研究着Bigger;他们不间断的凝视为观众描绘了他的形象。与独白相比，“Biggerlogue”并没有更大的特点。相反，黑鼠的声音揭示了一个强有力的声明:“我们都有两个想法。我们如何看待他们看待我们。我们如何看待自己。而是他们如何看待你在内部掌权。当你照镜子的时候，你只能看到他们告诉你的样子。一只黑老鼠sonofab----。1 Bigger盯着一面破碎的镜子，镜子里的他是一只啮齿类动物的化身。在黑鼠替他说话之后，大人物才开口说话。然而，比格只是站在那里——赤身裸体，浑身湿漉漉，瑟瑟发抖——仿佛他要么象征性地出生，要么象征性地受洗。灯熄灭了，“Biggerlogue”结束了。无数学者对赖特的小说进行了分析，认为它可以被解读为后殖民主义、反哥特式，或者它质疑的“不是一个人如何成为黑人，而是一个黑人如何(或者是否)成为男人”。一些学者明确指出，赖特在小说开头就加入了一只黑老鼠。例如，马修·兰伯特(Matthew Lambert)认为，“赖特在描述20世纪30年代非洲裔美国人在城市中的经历时，使用了[一只黑鼠]，以批评种族主义和不公平的住房条件。“我认为凯利的舞台改编中人性化的黑鼠质疑了动物性的中心地位——内在动物本性的概念——在定义人类、男人和其他关注白人至上主义的美国文化背景的过程中。通过这种方式，我通过反殖民的视角来阅读凯利的《土生之子》，关注权力结构是如何坚持假定的人类和动物本性来建立社会和种族等级制度的。在与托妮·莫里森关于美国文学中“非洲主义存在”的概念和西尔维娅·温特对人类形象的表述的对话中，我认为凯利《土生之子》中比格和黑鼠的关系代表了动物性在定义美国性及其对种族化他人的依赖方面的中心地位。温特将“人的千年”描述为西方努力创造人与“白人、资产阶级、异性恋男性”等同的观念的时期，这导致了“非人即不完全是人”的信念，而莫里森解释说，“作为国家建立的一项组织原则，人的权利不可避免地与非洲主义联系在一起”，或者说，非白人非洲主义者的存在成为“典型的美国身份”所必需的。定义美国性需要一个具体的自由和权力概念，而这有赖于对黑人的奴役。美国性需要“黑人和奴役的建构，这不仅可以在不自由中找到，而且通过肤色所创造的戏剧性极性，也可以在非我的投射中找到。”8换句话说，权力和自由成为与白人相关的种族化概念，而“强烈要求的、完全可用的、友好的自我强化和普遍的”则作为美国非洲主义出现。9凯利强调了白人的非我投射，通过人的出现、种族化和性别化的黑鼠，突出了被物化和种族化的身体所经历的假定的人性丧失。《黑鼠》也提供了一个镜头，通过它来审视他人在美国性发展中的影响，即通过双重意识的体现，或者杜波依斯所定义的“这种总是通过他人的眼睛看自己的感觉”。“双重意识无疑影响着社会如何定义人类……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906869
Julia Wright
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
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906870
Sondra Bickham Washington
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
汤姆叔叔的女儿萨拉与赖特的《黑色长歌》中经久不衰的厌女症桑德拉·比克汉姆·华盛顿(传记)厌女症，当男性表达或探索时，仍然是永恒的经典。理查德·赖特在他1938年出版的《汤姆叔叔的孩子们》一书的开头写了一段悼文，宣告与他同名的“畏畏缩缩的人，在白人之前就知道自己的位置”的死亡。因为这份简短的宣言是“来自另一代人的新词”，赖特立即为读者提供了对非裔美国人的描述，他们抵制奴隶制、种族主义、贫困和吉姆·克劳生活的古老束缚和压迫，而且在很大程度上，他履行了这一承诺。然而，赖特的宣言是不够的，因为他把汤姆叔叔的孩子，至少是那些有意或无意地参与抵抗和种族进步的孩子，想象成纯粹的父权血统。即使当他试图给女性角色增加深度时，比如《长黑歌》(Long Black Song)中的莎拉(Sarah)，她思考自己的生活，白日梦着另一种现实，欣赏自己的性取向，所有这些都表明了黑人女性的进步表现，赖特仍然限制了她领导变革的能力。因此，赖特的父权策略是明显的，不利于汤姆叔叔的革命孩子的更大的想法，尽管在他的收集中有许多其他激进主义的例子赖特的阳具中心主义倾向并没有赋予女性权力，而是低估了汤姆叔叔的女儿们为年轻一代的抵抗和激进主义做出有效贡献的能力和必要性，并将她们复杂的生活最小化考虑到赖特对非裔美国文学经典的巨大贡献，以及他在文学和文化研究方面的巨大影响，萨拉的故事是一个机会和出口，可以设计一个黑人妇女在种族歧视的南方同时面临多重压迫的性别和种族抵抗。然而，赖特默认了对滥交的耶洗别的陈旧的厌恶女性的表现。这种扁平化的人物塑造不仅落入了一种永恒的比喻，使莎拉的能动性和权力最小化，而且还证明并扩展了歪曲和贬低黑人女性的传统，并将其视为黑人男性的问题之一。作为一个文学巨子，赖特对莎拉、塞拉斯和这对夫妇的主要婚姻问题——她所谓的不忠和不忠——的描写影响深远，经久不衰，显然比他们所经历的种族主义和白人暴力更有影响力。它的影响如此之大，以至于在小说出版六十年后，导演凯文·罗德尼·沙利文、制片人丹尼·格洛弗、编剧罗恩·斯塔克·汤普森和阿什利·泰勒似乎在1996年HBO改编的《长黑歌》中内化并夸大了赖特对厌女症的看法。虽然赖特和电影制片人的作品假装真诚地考虑了一个黑人女性和她脆弱的交叉性，特别是在那个时候，他们对莎拉的性感和中心地位感到困惑，她承担了这种限制的全部重量。他们没有承认莎拉是一个性个体，她既可以被唤起，又可以拒绝在婚外表达这种兴趣，或者根本不承认，相反，他们精心设计的作品让读者和观众思考她是强奸的受害者，还是自愿参与随后的性接触在改编的例子中，电影制作人既错误地描述了莎拉，也误解了赖特的文本，暗示了她在一天的时间里坠入爱河并欺骗她忠诚、长期受苦的丈夫的可能性和方便性。这两种表现形式塑造、助长并证明了对萨拉的持续厌恶女性的解读和负面看法，进而延伸到“汤姆叔叔的女儿们”的后代，这仍然影响着今天的黑人女性。多年来，许多学者都记录了赖特作品中对女性的有问题的描述，6而萨拉的特征肯定与这些批评的各种原则相一致。显然，赖特知道如何创作一个关于激进分子的令人印象深刻的故事，但他没有想到这些角色也可能是女性。在这个旨在挑战现状、突出进步、革命的非裔美国人的系列中，萨拉是赖特不受人喜爱、厌恶女性的刻板印象之一，“把他置于传统的极端边缘，处于……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906871
Neal A. Lester
“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
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/pal.2023.a906872
Florian Bousquet
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
在南比·e·凯利(Nambi E. Kelley)的诗《现在的黑色艺术》(Black Art Now)的最后一行中，她宣称“我不是新人”(I AM NOT NEW)，她感到欠下的文学血统的某些东西被揭示了出来。从其剧名的互文性前景中可以清楚地看出，凯利的戏剧既关注她所处的当下，也关注非裔美国文学传统和那些“铺平道路、踢开大门、说该说的话”的祖先。在一次采访中，凯利谈到了自己的适应过程，她把自己想象成祖先们的“容器”，她以舞台的形式修复了祖先们的作品或生活:“我尽量不把自己放在其中，只是允许它，让它应该是什么样子，上帝、宇宙、精神和那些祖先通过我工作，将通过我工作，我只需要决定它是什么。”“通过凯利的艺术，改编或修正的作品是什么，正是我想在这篇文章中提出的问题。这篇文章的重点是她对理查德·赖特的《土生土长的儿子》的改编，并特别指出了在21世纪改编这部小说时面临的编剧挑战，这部小说因其对女性、黑人和白人的歧视而臭名昭著。”我认为，这部作品是一部复杂的实验性悲剧，它回应并协调了“忠于”赖特文本的对立约束，同时又让它与当代观众对话。凯利策略性地颠覆性地改写了小说的类型，以及人物的性别动态，参与了这部小说的复兴，詹姆斯·鲍德温(James Baldwin)在1951年曾说过，这部小说“今天是写不出来的”。2014年，《南比·凯利的土生之子》在芝加哥宫廷剧院首演，由美国蓝调剧院与塞雷特·斯科特担任导演，成为该剧院60年历史上票房最高的作品。之后，《南比·凯利的土生之子》在美国各地的剧院上演，表明当代观众愿意在舞台上看到这部经典的非裔美国文学。2018年，在安迪·查普曼(Andi Chapman)担任导演的安泰厄斯剧院公司(Antaeus Theatre Company)上演了这部剧，艺术总监基蒂·斯温克(Kitty Swink)在回应时强调了围绕这部小说戏剧化的性别政治，这是这部剧的评论员和评论家总体上没有注意到的:“一个女人改编，一个女人导演，一个男人的世界。”赖特的小说被改编成戏剧并不是什么新鲜事，无论是搬上舞台还是搬上电影，但迄今为止，这确实一直是男性的专属活动。赖特本人曾于1941年与保罗·格林一起担任第一部舞台剧的编剧，并在1951年皮埃尔·切纳尔改编的电影中饰演比格一角。因此，凯利的剧本是女权主义者重新阅读和重塑理查德·赖特的小说的创造性产物。谢丽尔·沃尔(Cheryl Wall)从斯蒂芬·亨德森(Stephen Henderson)那里借用的“担心台词”(worrying the line)概念，帮助我把凯利的改编看作是对小说“台词”及其血统的担忧。在凯利的改编中，时间不是线性的，比格的台词因为一个新角色的出现而加倍，这个角色告诉比格他应该如何行动和表现，贝西经常被批评的顺从被她“走出(她的)界限”所取代。然而，凯利的“担忧”并不局限于她的原始材料。正如我们将看到的，在现代人眼中，凯利对一个年轻黑人杀害女性行为的补救(尽管一个是偶然的，另一个不是)矛盾地涉及到更早的文本，比如10w年未删节版的《土子》(Native Son)。e·b·杜波依斯的《黑人之魂》11甚至是悲剧体裁来更好地将大人物和女性角色的命运带入21世纪。将一部小说改编成舞台形式，必然意味着要反思原著多么容易适合这种新媒体，以及哪种(次)流派……
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