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Books by Richard
Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
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Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices
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Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd Today!
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Books by Floyd W.
Hayes, III
A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African
American Studies /
Forty
Acres and a Mule: The Rape of Colored Americans
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The
American University of Paris Announces
The
International Richard Wright Centennial Conference
June 19-21, 2008
The American University of Paris
31, avenue Bosquet
75007 Paris
The Conference will represent broad
international and interdisciplinary explorations of
Wright’s life and writing, with a special emphasis on
the Paris he inhabited (1947-1960), both what it was and
what it is today as a result of the marks he left
behind, and on his experiences in Africa. Stressing the
importance of Richard Wright, the conference hopes to be
an international point of intersection for all those
interested in Wright’s work from literary and cultural
critics, to political activists, poets, musicians,
publishers and historians. We seek the widest range of
academic and public intellectual discussion around
Wright’s work which has influenced so many and so much.
http://www.aup.fr/news/special_events/wright.htm
Wright: Modern Identities,
Philosophical Fictions, Ethics of the Oppressed
PANEL 10
Panel chair: Tommie Shelby
Richard Wright and the Dilemma of the
Ethical Criminal:
Can One Live Beyond Good and Evil?
A Paper by
Floyd W Hayes III to be Delivered at
The
International Richard Wright Centennial Conference
(Paris)
Floyd W. Hayes, III
Department of Political Science and
Center for Africana Studies
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21208
410.516.7659
Fwhayes3@jhu.edu
Abstract
Richard
Wright’s powerful 1953 existential novel of ideas,
The Outsider, examines the life experience of a
self-possessed, knowledgeable, and intellectually gifted
black man, who is caught in the clutches of modern
American society, whose social institutions, according
to Wright, are based upon pretense. Significantly,
Wright is concerned to demonstrate the importance of
ideas and their power to influence human behavior.
The Outsider is a serious indictment of American
society’s nihilist political culture and its impact on
Blacks.
In
Wright’s view, these institutions, and the principles
upon which they are based, constitute so many veils of
illusion. Although a product of his circumstances,
Wright’s protagonist is not their victim. Rather,
Wright constructs an existential-nihilist anti-hero (a
sort of Nietzschean superman); he is a rebel who
is driven to be/become free--a free spirit. For Wright,
freedom means the struggle to think through the many
veils of illusion and, then, to act on this intellectual
warfare. Richard Wright seems to argue that the
American legal system, among several social
institutions, is one of those veils of illusion.
In his
search for freedom, Wright’s rebel-nihilist breaks the
laws of civil society, but he considers himself
innocent. He attempts to create and live by his own
values. Wright refers briefly to this figure as an
ethical criminal. There also is the district
attorney, who is sworn to uphold the law, but who does
not believe in the sanctity of the law. Rather, he
admires and identifies with those who break the rules of
civil society, yet view themselves as innocent. But can
individuals, particularly black persons, actually escape
the laws of a decadent American social order and create
their own rules? Can individuals live beyond good and
evil?
This
paper wrestles with Wright’s investigation of the
existential paradoxes of black life. Wright’s insight
that even blacks who commit crimes suffer from a gnawing
feeling of innocence raises the question of black
existence beyond problems of societal inclusion. This
paper is part of a larger book project on Richard
Wright’s social and political thought, entitled
Domination and Ressentiment: The Tragic Vision of
Richard Wright.
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posted 17 February 2008 |
