Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary

In African American fiction, Richard Wright was one of the most significant and influential authors of the twentieth century. Richard Wright in a Post-Racial America analyses Wright's work in relation to contemporary racial and social issues, bringing voices of established and emergent Wright scholars into dialogue with each other.

The essays in this volume show how Wright's best work asks central questions about national alienation as well as about international belonging and the trans-national gaze. Race is here assumed as a superimposed category, rather than a biological reality, in keeping with recent trends in African-American studies. Wright's fiction and almost all of his non-fiction lift beyond the mainstays of African-American culture to explore the potentialities and limits of black trans-nationalism. Wright's trans-native status, his perpetual "outsidedness" mixed with the "essential humanness" of his activist and literary efforts are at the core of the innovative approaches to his work included here.

William Dow is Professor of American Literature at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France. He is the author of Narrating Class in American Fiction (2009) and co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century (2011), Class Matters: Representing Class in American Culture, Literature, and Film (2009), and American Nostalgias (2002). His is the Managing Editor of Literary Journalism Studies.

Alice Craven is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature and Film Studies at American University of Paris, France, and Directeur de theses, Master program, in the Department of English at Institut Catholique de Paris, France. She is co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century (2011).

Yoko Nakamura is a graduate student at the American Univeristy of Paris, France.

Introduction: Alice Craven, William Dow

Part 1: Feeling the Way: Wright as Global Intellectual and Racial Reformer

1. "After Modernism: Richard Wright Interprets the Black Belt."
James Smethurst
2. "Sociological Interests, Racial Reform: Richard Wright's Intellectual of Color."
Cynthia Tolentino
3. "Richard Wright's Native Son and the Dialectics of Black Experience."
Anthony Dawahare
4. "The Negro Intellectual and the Tragic Sense of Hybridity: A Study in Postcolonial Existentialism."
Marc Mvé Bekale

Part 2: Giving Place to Richard Wright: Countering Censorship and Re-Contextualizing Literary Influence

5. "Richard Wright and His Editors: A Work under the Influence? From the Signifyin(g) Rebel to the Exiled Intellectual."
Laurence Cossu-Beaumont
6. "Re-Contextualizing Wright's The Outsider: Hugo, Dostoevsky, Max Eastman, and Ayn Rand."
Shoshana Milgram Knapp
7. "Wright's Radical Humanism: Proletarian Literature, Dehumanization, and the Black Radical."
Mollie Godfrey

Part 3: Wright's Other Destinies: Gothicism and the Neo-Baroque

8. "'Forged in Injustice': The Gothic Motif in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright."
Charles Scruggs
9. "Pulp Gothicism in Richard Wright's The Outsider."
William Dow
10. "Working the Underground Seam: Richard Wright's 'The Man Who Lived Underground' in the Light of Percival Everett's Zulus."
Michel Feith

Part 4: Richard Wright's Experimentation with Aesthetic Forms

11. "Forgotten Chapter: Richard Wright, Playwrights, and the Modern Theater."
Bruce Allen Dick
12. "A Wright to Sing the Blues: King Joe's Punch."
Steven C. Tracy
13. "Man of All Work? Richard Wright and the Performance of Black Female Subjectivity."
Zetta Elliott

Part 5: Transnational Shifts: Silence and Sentiment

14. "Richard Wright's 'Island' of Silence in The Long Dream."
Alice Mikal Craven
15. "Wright's Sentimental Journey: Race and Affect from Uncle Tom's Children to A Father's Law."
John C. Charles
16. "Richard Wright's Haiku: Deathbed Literature and the Present and Future State of Black Culture."
Sandy Alexandre

Afterword
Amritjit Singh

Bibliography

Index