Abstract

In his controversial urban novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright inverts animal stereotypes often used by whites to characterize African Americans. While critics typically focus on Wright’s use of the ape in the novel, I examine the role of the rat. Not only does the rat act as a creaturely trope for the impoverished conditions of Bigger and his family, it exposes the arbitrary boundaries white landlords and city leaders used to contain African Americans living in the Black Belt tenements of the South Side, Chicago. In transgressing these boundaries, the rat becomes an environmental fugitive, modelling for Bigger a form of resistance to the racist social and economic practices that trap blacks in constricting environmental spaces. By connecting Bigger and the rat, Wright also highlights links between racism and forms of anthropocentrism in ways that critique typical understandings of what constitutes human and animal “pests.” Drawing upon Timothy Morton’s “the strange stranger” and Jill Bennett’s “critical empathy,” I argue that Bigger and the rat create an aesthetic encounter with otherness, offering readers an empathic experience that recognizes and accepts difference.

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