This thesis interrogates Richard Wright's work through Frantz Fanon and his contemporary interlocutors in black studies, including Abdul JanMohamed, Fred Moten, Frank Wilderson, and David Marriott. The fundamental argument is that Wright's literary project is the genesis of an organizing project that seeks to call out to (those he identifies as) the \"totally dispossessed and disinherited\" in order to offer them the possibility of meaning in a life defined by antiblackness, and thus to aid them in the struggle against their oppressors. In the first chapter, I analyze black social death in Wright's work through what JanMohamed describes as the \"death bound subject,\" a subject who is produced by death, the very process of subject-negation. Next, I give a brief historical account of Wright's interest in political struggle and explicate his historical narrative of black trauma in the United States, intertwining his focus on the dispossessed with Fanon's emphasis on the revolutionary spontaneity of the \"lumpenproletariat.\" Under the terms of black social death, Wright establishes a need to focus on those dispossessed black proletarians who he judges lack the values or clear meaning in their lives by which they can struggle. In the second chapter, I focus on the tension between the optimism and pessimism in his writings. In the first section, I describe Wright's theorized process of rebellion embodied in Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son (1940), that JanMohamed calls the \"dialectic of death,\" which I frame as a part of the fugitive movement that Moten identifies in his interpretation of Fanon, \"The Case of Blackness\" (2008). The second section consists of an exegesis of Afro-pessimist thought, in which I consider Wilderson's perspective on the impossibility of narrativizing blackness, as well as Marriott's response to Moten, in which blackness is not fugitive, but \"n'est pas\" [is not] (to quote Fanon). Wright, I argue, prefigures what Marriott considers a Fanonian conception of blackness. In the third and final chapter, I consider the relationship between Wright and Fanon's understanding of black nationalism and how that influences 12 Million Black Voices, Wright's part-photo book, part-folk history (1941). For both radical thinkers, art plays a crucial role in the possibility of black liberation, which I frame in terms of Fanon's use of \"crystallization\" in the development of nationhood and the emancipatory desire of collective existence that Wright evokes. Under the terms of Afro-pessimism, the logic of Wright's work leads to a demand for the end of the world and the creation of a new one without antiblackness. In this context, what makes Wright such a powerful thinker and writer is his ultimate willingness to subordinate his own text to the praxis of other activists and organizers; in other terms, it is his recognition that while organizing needs values by which people can struggle, these values ultimately contribute to the production of the space in which that organizing can occur.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Richard Wright","Organizing","Afro-Pessimism"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24098