The Political Vision of Food and the Body in Black Boy
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This article investigates the ways in which Richard Wright’s Black Boy associates the problems of food and body with African Americans’ underprivileged lives. Wright describes how the social system entraps African Americans in poverty and low social status; poverty causes malnutrition, and physical/intellectual malnutrition makes it impossible for African Americans to escape miserable lives. The first part of this article focuses on the double function of hunger; while Wright suffers from constant hunger as a “black boy,” driven by his spiritual hunger he gains flesh and mobility by stealing food and knowledge. Leaving the South for the North, he gains opportunity to achieve a political voice, even though the North is far from a true home for him. The second part of the article explores how the problems of consumption and digestion are associated not only with Wright’s self-development but also with the vision of a sound America; just as Wright comes to better understand both himself and the outside world by consuming and digesting a variety of knowledge, he suggests that American civilization must learn to embrace diverse beings and ideas to become a sound body.
Abstract
This article investigates the ways in which Richard Wright’s Black Boy associates the problems of food and body with African Americans’ underprivileged lives. Wright describes how the social system entraps African Americans in poverty and low social status; poverty causes malnutrition, and physical/intellectual malnutrition makes it impossible for African Americans to escape miserable lives. The first part of this article focuses on the double function of hunger; while Wright suffers from constant hunger as a “black boy,” driven by his spiritual hunger he gains flesh and mobility by stealing food and knowledge. Leaving the South for the North, he gains opportunity to achieve a political voice, even though the North is far from a true home for him. The second part of the article explores how the problems of consumption and digestion are associated not only with Wright’s self-development but also with the vision of a sound America; just as Wright comes to better understand both himself and the outside world by consuming and digesting a variety of knowledge, he suggests that American civilization must learn to embrace diverse beings and ideas to become a sound body.
참고문헌 (11)
- Butler, Robert J, "The Quest for Pure Motion in Richard Wright's Black Boy", MELUS, 10(3), pp.5~17 (1983)
- Dunbar, Eve, "Black is a Region: Segregation and American Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright's The Color Curtain", African American Review, 42(1), pp.109~119 (2008)
- Felgar, Robert, "Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy" (1998), The Greenwood Press
- Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, "Mobility in Chains: Freedom of Movement in the Early Black Atlantic", The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(1), pp.41~59 (2001)
- Isaeff, Kristi, "The Image of Class in Literature, Media, and Society" (1998), University of Colorado Press
- JanMohamed, Abdul R, "The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death" (2005), Duke University Press
- Karem, Jeff, "‘I Could Never Really Leave the South’: Regionalism and the Transformation of Richard Wright's ‘American Hunger’", American Literary History, 13(4), pp.694~715 (2001)
- Warnes, Andrew, "Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918-1939" (2006), The University of Georgia Press
- Wright, Richard, "Black Boy" (1991), HarperCollins
- Wright, Richard, "Richard Wright Reader" (1978), Harper & Row
- Wright, Richard, "Uncle Tom's Children" (2008), HarperCollins