Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

Outsider Citizensexamines the development of social constructionist concepts of race, gender, and sexuality in the decade after 1945. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together central figures in the post war theorizing of race and gender--Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir--to examine their common sources in a complex fusion of existentialism, psychoanalysis, and American sociology of race. Along with James Baldwin,Wright and Beauvoir turn to representations of embodies consciousness and social existence to analyze outsider status within democratic modernity. Beginning with wright's construction of black masculinity inNative Son, Relyea also examines Beauvoir's use of, and dissent from, 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity, specifically those of Helen Deutsch. Finally, she examines the social construction of sexuality in Beauvoir and Baldwin, arguing that Giovanni's Room represents the undoing of a dominant American identity through the experience of exile and thereturn of the gaze, as the narrator confronts the sexual outsider within. All three writers offer the figure of the outsider to the modern citizen as a mirror, disclosing black alienation, immanence, and masochism, homophobia and betrayal.