Ä [B]igger's Place

In 1947, casting backward glance of a recent expatriate, Richard Wright observes in an interview, To be American in United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely people and anyone else who can be easily identified (I Feel 126; emphasis added). In United States, Wright suggests, such things as citizenship are determined to a large extent through subject's - more precisely, his or her body's - relation to specularity; questions of authority and disenfranchisement in American society relate to ways in which subject is located within regimes of (in)visibility. In her recent book devoted to uncovering Western economies of visibility, Robyn Wiegman proposes what seems very much like a reiteration of Wright's argument: Modern citizenship functions as a disproportionate system in which universalism ascribed to certain bodies (white, male, propertied) is protected and subtended by infinite particularity assigned to others (black, female, unpropertied). this system is itself contingent on certain visual relations, where only those particularities associated with Other are, quite literally, seen. (6) Similarly, in her influential essay National Brands/National Body, Lauren Berlant argues that, in United States, corporeality and citizenship (and its consequent rights) seem to be incompatible with one another. . white male privilege, she writes, has been veiled by rhetoric of bodiless citizen, generic 'person' whose political identity is a priori precisely because it is, in theory, non-corporeal. Unable to approximate ideal model of bodily abstraction American women and African-Americans have never had privilege to suppress (Berlant 112-13). Wiegman agrees with this: white male [is] 'freed' from corporeality that might otherwise impede his insertion into larger body of national identity, whereas, for African-American male, the imposition of an extreme corporeality define[s] his distance from privileged ranks of citizenry (94). In this paper, I propose to delineate specificities of African-American place in field of vision by turning to two of Richard Wright's texts, his 1940 novel Native Son and his 1938 short story Fire and Cloud. What becomes explicit from comparison between Wright's hugely influential debut novel and much less well-known story is a continuity; that is, both differences and similarities between two practices of subjugation through enforced visibility. We will see how effects of overdetermined specularity on African-American subjects depend on racial, epidermal markings being naturalized differences which are there, ineffaceably in full view on black bodies, as opposed to corporeal inscriptions which have been imposed onto bodies of African-American subjects at any particular time. Lynching and/as Enforced Visibility While he was composing Native Son, Wright also wrote Fire and Cloud, which originally appeared in Story Magazine in 1938. The story tells of an African-American minister, Dan Taylor, who, because of his influence among his congregation, is approached by Communist activists to endorse their cause, while being intimidated by town's white mayor and law enforcement officers not to get involved. When he will not promise his white visitors to tell his starving congregation not to take part in a march organized by communists, a white mob kidnaps him and drives him to outskirts of town where they beat him savagely. Bleeding, he makes his way back to his neighborhood. Taylor's hesitant ideas of justice are galvanized into a conviction by his lynching,(1) and he makes a stand: As starving members of his community gather at church, he addresses them, saying that they have to show a united front if they are to defeat white law which keeps them in poverty and hunger

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