Geography and literature in Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger)

Abstract

The autobiographical narrative Black Boy (American Hunger): records of childhood and youth, by Richard Wright, is divided into two parts: in the first one, “Southern night”, the author-narrator-character handles his experience of childhood in the South of United States; in the second one, “The horror and the glory”, his experience of moving to Chicago, in the north, is covered. The formal division is also a geographical division between south and north and, from this discursive arrangement, a symbolic field referring to History of Civil War between the agricultural and enslaving south and the industrialized north raises. Given this context, narrative fabrics are built up expressing imaginary construction about north: on one hand, the north as a place of possibilities to black community, in which racial violence is, apparently, weakened; on the other, the deconstruction of such imaginary considering evidences of discriminatory acts. Therefore, in this article, we aim to analyze meaning-making process constructed in the narrative by special dynamics managed by the narrator in dialogue to historical and cultural process. This analytical enterprise is based on Michel Collot’s (2012) postulates about literary geography, as well as Daniel-Henri Pegeaux’s (2011) considerations about the relations between Geography and Literature in a comparatist perspective. About north/south imaginary we appeal to African American Criticism, mainly, W. E. B. Du Bois (1901; 2007) and bell hooks (2009), as well as other theoretical voices according to the analytical need.