The Subversive Power of Signifying and the Ambivalence of Modernity in Richard Wright's Native Son

Authors

Lahoussine Hamdoune, Doctorant, Université Ibn Zohr, Agadir, Maroc

Abstract

Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940) is more often than not dealt with as a distinguished instance of African-American protest literature being lacking in terms of literariness and narrative techniques. While it is true that protest literature’s overemphasis on the socio-political is usually costly, at least as much as the authenticity of the characters and the literariness of a literary work are concerned, the many readings of Native Son looking at it almost exclusively within this frame hardly do justice to the work. A return to Henry Louis Gates's theory of Signifying posited in his seminal book The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African-American literary Criticism (1988) and Paul Gilroy's discussion of Richard Wright's ambivalent modernism in his book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) will offer an insight into a reading that goes beyond the theme of protest without dropping it altogether. Below I will examine Wright's representation and thematization of the Black vernacular speech, the African-American language games, Signification, and music.

Recommended Citation

Hamdoune, Lahoussine (2012) "The Subversive Power of Signifying and the Ambivalence of Modernity in Richard Wright's Native Son," Dirassat: Vol. 15, Article 15.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.aaru.edu.jo/dirassat/vol15/iss15/15