The Panoptic and Ideological Mechanism of White Surveillance in Richard Wright’s Native Son
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The issue of surveillance deserves special attention as an intrinsic component of African American history―spanning from the time that slaves were brought to the Americas on ships to the current concerns over US police repression against black people. Drawing on an analysis of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) as a representative literary work on surveillance, this paper examines how white surveillance serves to undermine black subjectivity and freedom, operating as the omnipresent external control over black people in the racially segregated sociocultural topography of Jim Crow. Because of white surveillance at enforcing upon black people the Jim Crow regulations, almost all sectors of American life have been transformed into a virtual prison for black people. This paper thus focuses on the panoptic mechanism of white surveillance, which confines black people within the ever-present vigilant white gaze that serves to not only keep them from encroaching on white properties and predominantly white areas, but also to find any presumptive evidence of black offenses. Under the panoptic regime of racially identifying gaze, black people are already framed as potential criminals simply because of their blackness, and thus they are habitually targeted as the most suspicious suspects of crimes such as rape and robbery. In this way, the white gaze toward blacks entails a certain ideological framework in which black people are naturally seen as possible offenders who warrant the scrutiny of white people.
Abstract
The issue of surveillance deserves special attention as an intrinsic component of African American history―spanning from the time that slaves were brought to the Americas on ships to the current concerns over US police repression against black people. Drawing on an analysis of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) as a representative literary work on surveillance, this paper examines how white surveillance serves to undermine black subjectivity and freedom, operating as the omnipresent external control over black people in the racially segregated sociocultural topography of Jim Crow. Because of white surveillance at enforcing upon black people the Jim Crow regulations, almost all sectors of American life have been transformed into a virtual prison for black people. This paper thus focuses on the panoptic mechanism of white surveillance, which confines black people within the ever-present vigilant white gaze that serves to not only keep them from encroaching on white properties and predominantly white areas, but also to find any presumptive evidence of black offenses. Under the panoptic regime of racially identifying gaze, black people are already framed as potential criminals simply because of their blackness, and thus they are habitually targeted as the most suspicious suspects of crimes such as rape and robbery. In this way, the white gaze toward blacks entails a certain ideological framework in which black people are naturally seen as possible offenders who warrant the scrutiny of white people.
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