Violence and Resistance in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945)

Abstract

This study examines the presentation of violence in Wright’s works Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). It seeks to argue that black violence is not savagery nor barbarism, but it is a response to it, as blacks attempt to redeem their humanity. It explores the conditions of African Americans who were facing social and actual death the American society and had no choice but to react in a violent manner. Violence is an outstanding theme in Richard Wright’s works. Colonial literature by white authors normally portrays blacks as violent, savage, and barbaric. This negative identification of blacks has been contested by Richard Wright in Black Boy and Native Son which usually show whites as pioneers of violence. Native Son and Black Boy grapple with the subject matter of African American struggles for survival against a plethora of brutal experiences due to slavery, discrimination, and racism. Wright therefore responds to historical and contextual realities of black lives and suggest that the violence his protagonists exhibit is a rational reaction to officialised and sanitised white violence. According to this study, violence can be a crucial and creative instrument for resistance in the development of new identifications which are primarily barred by prejudice and discrimination. By making an argument that violence is sometimes required and unavoidable, this study aims to challenge the widely held belief that it is detrimental and, therefore, not acceptable. The basic premise of this study is that, from the perspective of African Americans, American civilization is based on violence, and the only means by which to address it is by using violence. As a result, violence ceases to be a tool for wreaking havoc and assumes revolutionary and creative importance. Hence the study employs Marxist Theory, the concepts of “Counter violence” from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Paulo Freire’s “Dehumanization.” Thus, textual analysis as a method of gathering and analysing data was used to free the discourse from the reactionary dogma which equates white people’s violence on blacks with civilization and resistance by black people with pure evil. The main objective of Wright is to show that black people’s way of life and how they behave, was imposed on them by the white racial system. This study thus aimed to unpack the relationship between colonial violence and counter violence as addressed in Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy. It has unveiled the true nature of violence in its relationship to the idea of resistance, basing its analysis on the concept of Afro pessimism.