Between Martyrdom and Machismo: Black Men and the American South (review)

Even as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty continue to occupy the lion’s share of interest in southern criticism, the work of these giants and others must now contend with subjects and voices emerging from an influx of Latino and Asian immigrants into the South and from black migration north and west of the Mason-Dixon line. To this end, scholars have begun to mine the complex relationship between the South and broader contexts within the nation and across the globe. The two volumes reviewed here offer proof of these inroads, to which many critics refer as “new southern studies.” The focal points of both books illuminate the ongoing impact of Jim Crow policies on black men living in the South and elsewhere, but the methods of argument by Riché Richardson and Abdul JanMohamed could not be more divergent. Richardson fixes a socio-historical lens over a wide range of artists—filmmakers, musicians, and authors—while JanMohamed plumbs the psychology of one prominent author, Richard Wright, and several of his male protagonists. Equally convincing in their analyses, Richardson and JanMohamed similarly stress the necessity of examining black male subjects, regardless of their relocation, through the prism of southern history and experience.

Like many of his characters who were born in the South and moved north, Richard Wright felt the lasting influence a segregated society had on him long after he left it. Characterizing his state of mind around the age of eleven, Wright explains in his autobiography Black Boy that although whites had never directly abused him, he felt “conditioned to their existence as though [he] had been the victim of a thousand lynchings” (72). Exploring how the omnipresent effects of white violence and the threat of death influenced the formation of black subjectivity motivated much of Wright’s artistic production, and understanding how Wright’s attitude about this subject evolved over the span of his literary career serves as the focus of The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. By offering a chronological but selective analysis of Wright’s fiction and autobiography, JanMohamed presents a clear, but increasingly complex, assessment of Wright’s depiction of the death-bound-subject, one constructed from birth onward by an ever-present menace of death.

Beginning with Uncle Tom’s Children, JanMohamed explores Wright’s dialectics of death, which becomes the book’s primary conceptual framework for reading the relationship between social, physical, and symbolic death in Wright’s work. As JanMohamed explains, the primary means of coercion by the slave master was to manipulate the slave’s fear of physical death in order to keep him in complete acquiescence of his social death. If, however, the slave can free himself from this fear by willfully accepting his physical death, he can save himself from social death. This willful acceptance of death offers the greatest hope for liberation and agency for the black subjects in Wright’s work. As JanMohamed explains, much of Wright’s fiction charts the psychological evolution of the black subject as he moves toward this acceptance. This move constitutes a necessary step in the enactment of a more politically efficacious symbolic death, which signaled “the death of the slave’s subject position as a socially dead being and his rebirth in a different subject position” (17). This rebirth and the complications to identity formation that it opens up become the focus of the latter half of JanMohamed’s book, beginning with his analysis of The Outsider and continuing through to Wright’s 1958 novel The Long Dream.

Largely psychoanalytical in his theoretical approach, JanMohamed breaks away from established readings of Wright’s work in two important ways. First, in resisting Baldwin’s assessment of Wright...