From No Man's Land to Mother-land: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Anthony Dawahare

While Wright identifies a cultural nationalism in decline, he nonetheless believed that writers should acknowledge and strategically appropriate the varying degrees of cultural nationalism among black Americans. "Negro writers who seek to mold or influence the consciousness of the Negro people," asserts Wright, "must address their messages to them through the ideologies and attitudes fostered in this warping way of life" ("Blueprint" 101). It is important to note that "their messages" for Wright were (or should have been) derived from "a Marxist conception of reality" (102). And, in this sense, he was consistent with the dominant thinking by Communist intellectuals of the time on "minority" literature. According to one Soviet intellectual of the period who published an article on Langston Hughes in International Literature, minority literature should be "socialist in content and national in form" (Filatova 107). In short, black writers should represent the cultural nationalism of blacks from a socialist perspective by depicting "national" difference, inter-nationalist identity, and - echoing Georg Lukacs's influential essay" 'Tendency' or Partisanship?" published in the Partisan Review in the 1930s - "society as something becoming rather than as something fixed and admired" ("Blueprint" 98-99; my emphasis). As a reading of Uncle Tom's Children (1940) attests, Wright was careful to represent contextually degrees of cultural nationalism in his characters, depicting virtually all of his Southern characters as cultural nationalists.(3)

One therefore finds cultural nationalist identifications most eroded in his male urban protagonists from the 1930s, namely Jake Jackson from Lawd Today! and Bigger Thomas from Native Son. Jake and Bigger represent Wright's view of what happens when a first generation of "debased," male feudal folk are subjected to the modern ideologies and practices prevalent in Northern urban centers (specifically Chicago): They become, as Wright explains of Bigger, "vague" cultural nationalists because, even though they are forced to identify as black, they do not identify with the black culture of their parents ("How 'Bigger' Was Born" 527); Bigger, Wright tells us, "had become estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race" (513). Bigger and Jake are "Negro nationalist[s] in a vague sense" only because of their "intense hatred of white people" (527), which serves (in place of a strong folk identity) to strengthen their identification as "black."

Wright refunctions the war-time notion of a "No Man's Land" to designate the experience his urban male characters have of being in the interstice of two cultures or, as Houston Baker argues, of having "black placelessness" (201). Only Wright's male urban protagonists are caught in the "No Man's Land," because they are "granted" by the patriarchal organization of American society more social intercourse with urban culture than his female characters. Most of the representations of Bigger and Jake (both of whom, significantly, grew up in the South) center on their being not at home but on the streets or at work in "civilization," thus alienating them further from their Southern origins.(4)