Death-Bound-Subject , livre ebook

343

pages

English

Ebooks

2005

Écrit par
JanMohamed Abdul R. JanMohamed

Publié par
Duke University Press

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343

pages

English

Ebooks

2005

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

21 avril 2005

EAN13

9780822386629

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

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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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

21 avril 2005

EAN13

9780822386629

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

        -      -       

   -                        

Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

The Death-Bound-Subject

             ’                   

Abdul R. JanMohamed

Duke University Press Durham and London 

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Carter and Cohn Galliard

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

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Acknowledgments

The research for this study of Wright was conducted, at its earliest stages, with the generous aid of a fellowship from the University of California Humanities Research Insti-tute at the University of California, Irvine (for a collabo-rative research project on ‘‘Minority Discourse’’), and in its ﬁnal stages with the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, and a Humanities Research Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley. I am deeply grateful to all of them for providing me the time to complete my work. I remain forever grateful to my colleagues—Pal Ahlu-walia, Maria Bates, Marcial Gonzalez, Saidiya Hartman, George Lipsitz, Kenny Mostern, and John Carols Rowe— for reading portions of the manuscript at various stages of revision and providing encouragement, criticism, and fruitful suggestions. I would particularly like to thank Donna Przybylowicz, who has ‘‘lived’’ with this project on death for many years and who has enlivened it; Mitch Breitweiser, whose unfailing support and prolonged and incisive conversation about this and many other projects and topics have been absolutely invaluable; and Ruth Jen-nison and Kimberly Tsau, whose assistance in the research process and in various stages of preparing the manuscript proved invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank Ken Wis-soker, Pam Morrison, and the staﬀ at Duke University Press for expertly guiding the manuscript through the production process.

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