Anti-Racism and Existential Philosophy

Kathryn Sophia Belle’s (formerly Kathryn T. Gines’) publications engaged in this interview:2003 (Fanon/Sartre 50 yrs) “Sartre and Fanon Fifty Years Later: To Retain or Reject the Concept of Race,” Sartre Studies International, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (2003): 55-67, https://doi.org/10.3167/135715503781800213.2010 (Convergences) “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, pages 35-51. Eds. Maria Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, Donna Dale Marcano. New York: SUNY, 2010.2011 (Wright/Legacy) “The Man Who Lived Underground: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophical Legacy of Richard Wright,” Sartre Studies International, Vol. 17, Issue 2 (2011): 42-59, https://doi.org/10.3167/ssi.2011.170204.2012 (Reflections) “Reflections on the Legacy and Future of Continental Philosophy with Regard to Critical Philosophy of Race,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 50, Issue 2 (June 2012): 329-344, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2012.00109.x.

Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision

The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.

Interplay of Things

In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things, and he traces how pop art and readymades point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens's performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means by which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things.

Music of Survival: A Search for Identity in the Works of Richard Wright

The complexly changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of the written record are the marks of American literature. Social forces always make their imprint on literature. Especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with and sensitive response to cultural forces, the literature has responded quickly to such pressures. African American literature consists of the literary work by the writers of Afro-origin settled in USA. The category“ slave narratives” were writings by people who had experienced slavery. It described their journeys to independence and their survival struggles. The concepts explored and issues raised were racism, slavery, and social equality.

Realist Pace

Reality principle, reality effect: those two notions—psychoanalytical, narratological, epistemological—have determined our understanding of nineteenth-century literature explicitly for at least half a century. But perhaps they were both, after all, functions of narrative pace. That is what this chapter begins by arguing: that what we consider to be realism is largely a function of pace that mediates between two senses of scene. Scene, like summary, is not an altogether coherent unit. One must acknowledge that it is split between a dramatic-presentational aspect and a pictorial-representational one and that that split is decisive for how realist narrative defines its movement. The central example here is Middlemarch, with Balzac and Flaubert in the near background. But the chapter ends by looking far forward, considering the capacity of narrative fiction to pause and to speak to its reader, from Fielding and Eliot to Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.

Roads to and from Revolution

This chapter traces Rahv’s forays into and retreats from political radicalism. Letters to Ethel Richman and essays published in the early 1930s (“An Open Letter to Young Writers”, “The Literary Class War”) reveal his deep-seated faith in Marxism and ambivalent commitment to Communism. It describes the founding of Partisan Review, sponsored by the Communist John Reed Club. It considers the magazine’s attention to diversity and social justice and the modern feminist theory of intersectionality, through which interconnected categories of race, class, and gender create overlapping systems of discrimination. The chapter focuses on Partisan Review’s publication of works by proletarian writers including Richard Wright and several women writers: Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Lerner (Olsen), Grace Lumpkin. It explains Rahv’s break with communism after 1934, in response to the Soviet policy of the Popular Front and Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials. The “Personal Reflections” sections shows how Communism touched my life.