The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Softcover

Janmohamed, Abdul R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822334887 ISBN 13: 9780822334880

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

During the 1940s, in response to the charge that his writing was filled with violence, Richard Wright replied that the manner came from the matter, that the "relationship of the American Negro to the American scene [was] essentially violent," and that he could deny neither the violence he had witnessed nor his own existence as a product of racial violence. Abdul R. JanMohamed provides extraordinary insight into Wright's position in this first study to explain the fundamental ideological and political functions of the threat of lynching in Wright's work and thought. JanMohamed argues that Wright's oeuvre is a systematic and thorough investigation of what he calls the death-bound-subject, the subject who is formed from infancy onward by the imminent threat of death. He shows that with each successive work, Wright delved further into the question of how living under a constant menace of physical violence affected his protagonists and how they might "free" themselves by overcoming their fear of death and redeploying death as the ground for their struggle.

Drawing on psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological analyses, and on Orlando Patterson's notion of social death, JanMohamed develops comprehensive, insightful, and original close readings of Wright's major publications: his short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children; his novels Native Son, The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream; and his autobiography Black Boy/American Hunger. The Death-Bound-Subject is a stunning reevaluation of the work of a major twentieth-century American writer, but it is also much more. In demonstrating how deeply the threat of death is involved in the formation of black subjectivity, JanMohamed develops a methodology for understanding the presence of the death-bound-subject in African American literature and culture from the earliest slave narratives forward.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Abdul R. JanMohamed is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa and a coeditor of The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse.

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"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

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The Death-Bound-Subject

RICHARD WRIGHT'S ARCHAEOLOGY OF DEATHBy Abdul R. JanMohamed

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3488-0

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................ix1 Introduction: The Culture of Social-Death...........................12 Uncle Tom's Children: Dialectics of Death...........................453 Native Son: Symbolic-Death..........................................774 Black Boy: Negation of Death-Bound-Subjectivity.....................1385 The Outsider: Patricidal Desires....................................1756 Savage Holiday: Matricide and Infanticide...........................2107 The Long Dream: Death and Paternal Function.........................2338 Renegotiating the Death Contract....................................266Notes.................................................................301Works Cited...........................................................317Index.................................................................323

Chapter One

Introduction

THE CULTURE OF SOCIAL-DEATH

Richard Wright's first published short story, "Big Boy Leaves Home," consists of a rite of initiation in which the protagonist, generically named Big Boy, reaches his "manhood" by being forced to witness the shooting of two of his friends and the slow, gruesome lynching of another. In Wright's last published novel, The Long Dream, which revisits the "same" scene (the parallelism of which will be explored in detail in chapter 7), a similar initiation requires Fishbelly, the young protagonist of this bildungsroman, to reach his "manhood" also by watching a lynching, less gruesome, but no doubt more traumatic: not only is he forced by the white chief of police to watch his father, who has been shot by the police, bleed to death slowly, but he is also prevented from summoning medical help, thereby being compelled to share the guilt of his father's death. In between these two fictional events, Wright complains-at about the age of eleven, when, after a very traumatic childhood, he is caught up in the frenzied white riots and numerous lynchings in the South that followed the First World War-that, though "I had never in my life been abused by whites, ... I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings" (Black Boy, 72). Though all the evidence available to us strongly suggests that Wright was a gentle, loving man, the evidence is equally clear that his fiction is replete with gruesome, deathly violence: lynching, murder, and violent struggles to the death are the leitmotifs that tie his novels and short stories together into a coherent body of work. Wright was clearly obsessed with death and lynching. For instance, his first three fictional works, a collection of five short stories and two novels, contain a total of twenty violent, gruesome deaths, including those of all but two of the protagonists. Though critics have commented on the ubiquitousness of violence in Wright's work, it is curious that no one has yet fully articulated the fundamental ideological and political functions of death in his work and life.

This is understandable to some extent: death is an eventuality that none of us want to examine too closely; it immediately, universally, and perhaps "automatically" provokes disavowal of one sort or another. But, if we are willing and able to bracket our fears and anxieties about death and look closely at its political valences and functions in Wright's fiction, something remarkable is revealed. I hope to demonstrate by the end of this study that Wright conducted, partly through a series of conscious and deliberate decisions, but partly through extremely sharp intuitive, often unconscious choices, a systematic and thorough archaeology of what I will call "the death-bound-subject," that is, of the subject who is formed, from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death. The death-bound-subject is a deeply aporetic structure to the extent that he is "bound," and hence produced as a subject, by the process of "unbinding." The processes through which that aporetic subject is produced by the threat of death constitute the fundamental object of this study. Put in their simplest forms, the cardinal questions posed in the rest of this book are the following: What happens to the "life" of a subject who grows up under the threat of death, a threat that is constant yet unpredictable? How does that threat permeate the subject's life? How far and how finely does death penetrate into the capillary structures of subjectivity (considered here as a psychopolitical construct)? And, finally, once death has percolated into the innermost reaches of subjectivity, what kinds of effects does it have, and how does it manifest itself eventually in the comportment, attitudes, and actions of the death-bound-subject? Though Wright never fully articulated the questions in this manner, I hope to demonstrate that they furnish the underlying teleological structure of his work.

I will be arguing that Wright's pursuit of these questions was unconsciously tenacious to the point of obsession and that each of his fictional works excavates progressively deeper layers of the same site, that on which the formation of the death-bound-subject took place. And what Wright's archaeology of death unearths is neither idiosyncratic nor, ultimately, eccentric; it is, indeed, extreme, but not eccentric. Because it throws everything into stark relief, it is the kind of extremity that better allows us to comprehend the "normal" effects of the threat of death on the formation of subjectivity. And, because it can do this, it opens up a door to the critical understanding of a much larger formation and tradition. My work on Wright has convinced me that there exists a powerful, if somewhat submerged, tradition within African American literature and culture that continually and systematically meditates on the effectivity of the threat of death as a mode of coercion. I say "somewhat submerged" because the tradition's existence-from the earliest slave narratives (Equiano's reporting of slaves being buried alive, Douglass's classic battle with Covey, and Jacobs's equally classic form of resisting slavery by a prolonged sequestering of herself in her grandmother's garret, a space roughly twice the size of a coffin, where she almost dies several times), to the powerful contemporary reevaluations and renewed articulations (a remarkable cluster of feminist novels such as Beloved, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Corregidora that investigate the ramifications of death's invasion of the very site of biological and cultural reproduction, reconceptualizations such as Ernest Gaines's A Lesson before Dying and John Edgar Wideman's The Lynchers, and the lyrics of rappers such as Tupac and Biggie)-is, in many ways, self-evident. While it would be easy to demonstrate that the writers participating in these literary and cultural formations are perfectly aware of the existing tradition and of their continued revision of it, the professional, academic, critical analyses of this tradition, with the exception of some initial forays into the field (discussed below), have not done it much justice.

While there is no space here for even a very rough and preliminary sketch of this tradition, a few remarks are necessary to contextualize my study of Wright. In the first place, it must be noted that this entire tradition is profoundly, if...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822334887
• ISBN 13: 9780822334880
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 342
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar