In the Vortex of Modernity: Writing Blackness, Blindness and Insight

In this essay, we revisit one of the most radical literary expressions of American modernism, Richard Wright’s Native Son, to address the critical relationship between (writing) Blackness and (in) racial America. We highlight Wright’s use of the rhetoric of blindness and vorticity in Bigger’s tortuous and deadly journey from racial immurement to self-redemption. This redemption, we contend, is achieved in the problematic Book Three through the will to self-authorship, the one antidote against the scripting of Bigger’s life by the ravages of racialism in America.