The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death

Abdul R. JanMohamed

Published by Duke University Press 2005

The Death-Bound-Subject

Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death

Abdul R. JanMohamed
Edited by: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

In the series Post-Contemporary Interventions

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386629

Overview
Contents

About this book

A literary exploration of the prevalence of death--its connection to political oppression and its use as salvation--in Richard Wright’s work.

Author / Editor information

Abdul R. JanMohamed is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa and a coeditor of The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse.

Reviews

“Abdul JanMohamed reworks the concept of ‘social death’ to read Richard Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and psychoanalysis along the way to rethink ‘lordship and bondage’ as the ‘death contract’ and to discern the precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its detailed consideration of Wright’s corpus, its theoretical ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigms it offers for rethinking slavery, death, and resistance.”—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley

“This is a path-breaking, imaginative, comprehensive, indeed magisterial, analysis of the ways in which death functions in the construction of black subjectivities in Richard Wright’s fiction, autobiographies, and journalism. It both expands our understanding of Wright’s achievement and models a way in which the spectre of violence, lynching, and death may be seen to shadow and shape a trajectory of African American cultural production.”—Valerie Smith, author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. Introduction: The culture of social-death Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Uncle Tom’s Children: Dialectics of death Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3. Native Son: Symbolic-death Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
4. Black Boy: Negation of death-bound- subjectivity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	138
5. The Outsider: Patricidal desires Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
6. Savage Holiday: Matricide and infanticide Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	210
7. The Long Dream: Death and the paternal function Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
8. Renegotiating the Death Contract Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	266
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 342

eBook

Published: April 21, 2005
ISBN: 9780822386629