Description
Book SynopsisA literary exploration of the prevalence of death--its connection to political oppression and its use as salvation--in Richard Wright's work.
Trade Review“Abdul JanMohamed reworks the concept of ‘social death’ to read Richard Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and psychoanalysis along the way to rethink ‘lordship and bondage’ as the ‘death contract’ and to discern the precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its detailed consideration of Wright’s corpus, its theoretical ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigms it offers for rethinking slavery, death, and resistance.”—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
“This is a path-breaking, imaginative, comprehensive, indeed magisterial, analysis of the ways in which death functions in the construction of black subjectivities in Richard Wright’s fiction, autobiographies, and journalism. It both expands our understanding of Wright’s achievement and models a way in which the spectre of violence, lynching, and death may be seen to shadow and shape a trajectory of African American cultural production.”—Valerie Smith, author of
Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist ReadingsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
1. Introduction: the Culture of Social-Death 1
2. Uncle Tom's Children: Dialectics of Death 45
3. Native Son: Symbolic-Death 77
4. Black Boy: Negation of Death-Bound-Subjectivity 138
5. The Outsider: Patricidal Desires 175
6. Savage Holiday: Matricide and Infanticide 210
7. The Long Dream: Death and the Paternal Function 233
8. Renegotiating the Death Contract 266
Notes 301
Works Cited 317
Index 323
