Race, Violence, and the City: Chicago’s Black Urbanity in Contemporary American Film and Literature

In this article we look at three recent films–Native Son (2019, dir. Rashid Johnson, based on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel), Widows (2018, dir. Steve McQueen, based on a 1983 TV series), and The Hate U Give (2018, dir. George Tillman Jr., based on a book by Angie Thomas)–by Black directors that showcase the interactions between Blacks and whites in an American urban milieu. We argue that the setting of two of these films–Native Son and Widows–in Chicago, with The Hate U Give being set in a fictional urban setting bearing a strong resemblance to the Windy City, serves to articulate the continuing racial divisions of American cities in the twenty-first century. The three films show that the fossilization of the divide between Black and white districts inevitably leads to outbreaks of racial violence.

The Myth of Sisyphus in Richard Wright’s Native Son

The identification of archetypes in literary texts follows the path of deep structural analysis, as surface reading will dwell ordinarily at the level of incidents. This research is driven by the configuration of the myth of Sisyphus in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Our claim is that the myth figures in the text as a shade of the crime and punishment sequence, with an absurdist twist. This claim is substantiated following the archetypal literary theory, which employs to a great extent the methods of discourse analysis. The novel has often been read along the ideological questions that racism raises and attempts to answer. This essay marks a deviation from that seemingly jaundiced view of literature. What this essay foregrounds is the eternal regeneration of narratives, an eternalness that bears the nature of the archetype in its repetitiveness. This necessitates the choice of archetypal literary criticism as the theory for this research. To reach its conclusions, this article adopts a qualitative approach, taking its data from the events in the novel, and investigating the mythic orientations at work in the novel, with the view that at the forefront of this is the myth of Sisyphus, a shade of the myth of crime and punishment. This article does not account for the sociocultural frame of racism as a material but understands it in the wider conception of myth, as a figuration of the Sisyphean myth which shares with the racism in the text the quality of perpetuity or seeming endlessness. We show that racism is in this akin to the sufferings and struggles of Sisyphus, that it is Sisyphean.

Botchan

This English translation of 坊っちゃん (1906) was published in Tokyo by Ogawa Seibundo in 1918. It is a first-person narrative of a young man’s two-month tenure as assistant mathematics teacher at a provincial middle school in 1890s Japan. A native son of Tokyo, with all its traits and prejudices, he finds life in a narrow country town unappealing — with its dull and mischievous students, scheming faculty, bland diets, stifling rules, and gossipy inhabitants. Impulsive, combative, committed to strict ideals of honesty, honor, and justice, he is quickly enmeshed in the strategems of the head teacher, “Red Shirt.” His sufferings and confusion continue to mount until finally he and fellow-teacher “Porcupine” are able to deliver a “heavenly chastisement” and escape the island, back to his one emotional attachment, Kiyo, the old family retainer. Natsume Kinnosuke (1867-1916) signed his work Sōseke — “stubborn.” Like the narrator of Botchan, he was a city-born Tokyo-ite, who found himself teaching middle school in remote Matsuyama in Shikoku in 1895. He emerged to study English literature in London, become Professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and a successful novelist, beginning with the popular I Am a Cat in 1905.