대항 린칭 서사 읽기: 리처드 라이트의 토박이

Reading Counter-Lynching Narrative: Richard Wright’s Native Son

This essay reads Richard Wright’s Native Son as counter-lynching narrative in which he reasserts black manhood and represents the symbolic interracial working-class male bond by relegating black and white women to conduits of exchange between men, black and white. Reflective of the destruction of interracial working-class solidarity in the early twentieth-century United States, Native Son investigates the ways in which lynching narrative stigmatizes black male sexuality and offers its counter-lynching discourse. This essay addresses how the novel portrays black man as the universalized feature of racial oppression. By analyzing the protagonist Bigger‘s relationship with the white communist Jan, I contend that it is white and black women that function as the exchange objects over which white and black men can form a homosocial bond. This essay also explores misogyny and homophobia embedded in Wright’s portrayal of black manhood. Native Son renders the injurious effects of racism on black men as their feminization and homosexualization. My essay concludes that Wright’s text reinscribes masculine heteronormativity and marginalizes female and queer subjects.