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Richard Wright, Arnold Rampersad tells us, was "perhaps the most significant and influential" African American author of the twentieth century (11). The "perhaps" with which Rampersad quali- fies his claim is probably unnecessary, as even critics who doubt the artistry or literary merit of Wright's work do not deny that as the first African American novelist of international stature he opened doors previously closed to black writers. James Baldwin, Wright's most insistent contemporary critic, admits that he viewed Wright as his "spiritual father" and Wright's work as "a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself" ("Alas" 259, 256). To the extent that this latter requirement was true, in varying degrees, for a number of later twentieth-century black writers, Wright's status as preeminent black novelist is secure.
Nonetheless, I want to question the "blackness" of Wright's most famous novel, Native Son. Immediately, I should clarify that I am not questioning Wright's blackness or his commitment to the antiracist and anticolonial struggles of blacks and other peoples of color worldwide. My concern here is with Wright's fiction, which we read and teach in African American literature courses, presumably because Wright himself was black, as are most of his protagonists. Yet it seems to me that, beginning with Native Son, Wright's novels, unlike most other African American fiction, are unconcerned with the question of black subjectivity. Indeed, to the extent that Wright's work equates blackness with limitation, terror, and submission, black subjectivity tends to become a contradiction in terms, particularly for his black male characters. Thus I claim that Wright's project is constructing not racialized subjects, but gendered ones. That is, the question that animates Wright's texts is not how one becomes a black man, but how (or if) a Negro becomes a man.
Of course, even as the election of Barack Obama has led some Americans to anticipate (and even proclaim) the advent of a postracial society, many scholars continue to express deep suspicion at the idea that one could assume a gender identity that was not also always already raced. I share this suspicion; in so far as manhood in the United States has typically been defined by who does and does not have access...