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264 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Smith, Virginia Whatley, Ed. Richard Wright: Writing America at Home and from Abroad. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 240 pp. ISBN: 9781496803801 . $65.00 Hardcover. Some years ago I happened to have lunch with Professor Virginia Whatley Smith in Boston during the conference of the American Literature Association. As we chatted, she outlined her plans for future work on Richard Wright. The first fruit of those plans was the edited volume Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections, which appeared in Mississippi’s Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. It was an opportune placement for the work, given Walker Alexander’s numerous connections to Wright and his history. A couple of the contributors to that earlier volume have essays in Richard Wright: Writing America at Home and from Abroad, and Robert Butler and Whatley Smith are represented by two essays each in the current collection, but I see that as the proverbial embarrassment of riches. In his Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy had called for greater attention not only to Wright’s journeys through Africa and Europe but particularly to the writer’s late works. The present gathering honors that imperative. In Whatley Smith’s introduction she advises that “this collection captures that latter phase of the self-liberated artist and man.” One of the major features of this collection is the adept way that the various critics follow the intricate interweaving of the formal, social and political in Wright’s writings. Ginevra Geraci, in the opening chapter, offers a striking analysis of Wright’s narrative techniques in “Down by the Riverside.” She highlights the way that Wright moves in and out of free indirect discourse, in and out of dialect. At one moment, we are listening to the narrator, then we realize we are witnessing Mann’s interior monologue. One moment we are hearing the dialect spoken by the character, then with no warning we are reading a “standard” English account of the thoughts of that same character. It may be that these shifts slide past the eye of casual readers, and yet we can be certain the artist gave much thought to the technique in these passages. Whatley Smith exhibits a similarly keen eye for detail in her meditations on “Bigger Thomas’s Carceral Societies,” where she sees in the poster of Buckley that Bigger passes the unblinking carceral gaze of the panoptican, not only demonstrating the inherently carceral nature of the ghetto, but also the mechanisms designed to cause the inhabitants of the ghetto to internalize that surveilling gaze. One of the more original moments in this volume comes with Joseph Keith’s considerations of “the form of secrecy itself.” Here, Keith is not simply arguing for a reconsideration of The Outsider, he is advancing a much more far-reaching argument about the nature of the secret, seeing it as a “crucial mode of dissent within the repressive context of the early Cold War,” enabling a “mode of ‘un-belonging,’” a mode we might well see as animating much of Wright’s adult life. CLA JOURNAL 265 Book Reviews Oneof themostrevelatoryessaysisToruKiuchi’s“PsychologyasSelf-Reflection in Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday.” One need not be a fan of psychological approaches, or even of this novel, to be fascinated by Kiuchi’s tracing of Wright’s research of and fascination with the notorious case of Clinton Brewer, who Wright met on a visit to Trenton State Prison. As gripping as Brewer’s story is, we know it now not for its intrinsic qualities, which no doubt qualify for an episode of Discovery Investigation TV, but because of what it impelled Wright to think, to imagine, to create. Making an analogy to jazz, Kiuchi seems to think that discord is a matter of tempo, but that is a minor flaw in an overall brilliant exposition. John Lowe, always given to the revelatory, presents readers with the somewhat startling title “Wright on Patmos,” in which he delineates the many ways that Wright anticipated Gilroy’s transcontinental diasporic approach, which is exactly why Gilroy went to Wright to make his case for the Black Atlantic. Robert Butler points out the eerie sonic echo of the...

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