Blog11.26.2019

Preface to a second viewing of HBO Native Son



 "If you look at Wright, or if you look at me, we are not begging the question of black humanity.  We accept it."



Margaret Walker, "My Idol Was Langston Hughes." Southern Cultures (Summer 2010): 70





Given my aesthetic prejudices, it is necessary to preface  a second viewing of HBO Native Son by re-reading  



Richard Wright, "How 'Bigger' Was Born" ----What can we reasonably conclude about Wright's purpose and intentions?



as well as chapters from

·         Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.  New York: Oxford University Press 1985 ---How might one talk about the rhythms and diversity of pain from  theoretical and practical angles?  What is the probable impact of pain?  How is the visual and verbal representation of pain in a film significantly different from the representation of pain in a novel?

·         Tommy J. Curry. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre ad the Dilemmas of Black Manhood.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press,  2017.---Whose pathology is exposed when the claim is made that African American males do not have gender?

·         Abdul R. JanMohamed. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ---How might  one "read" Bessie's death in Wright's novel against her life in HBO Native Son?

It is necessary to also read

·         Claudine Rankine's essay "The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning" in The Fire This Time, ed. Jesmyn Ward.  New York: Scribner, 2016:  145-155.----Does her argument lend credibility to white epistemology as we find it in legal discourses on Black Lives Matter?

·         Cavell Wallace. "Emotional Rescue: For Black Americans, Love Blooms in the Shadow of Death: What Does It Mean to See That on the Big Screen?" The New York Times Magazine, November 24, 2019: 30-35.---Does HBO Native Son disturb the "legitimacy of love" in the Western orbit of the United State of America?

·         Ta-Nehisi Coates. "The Cancellation of Kaepernick."  New York Times OP-ED, November 23, 2019: A 27.---Is the film, to borrow words from Coates, " a fight for a world where we are not shot, or shunned, because masters of capital, of their agents do not like our comportment, our attire, or what we have to say?"

Aesthetic prejudices give hellacious  work to cultural criticism.



The yoking of politics and art in Native Son (1940) seems to become a potential post-something that envisions female and male ontology in HBO Native Son (2018).  Because the envisioning  tends to be antithetical to Wright's original ideas about  America's systemic racism, it is problematic.  To some extent it  is an irony-laden negation of Wright's ideas.  And it constitutes  grounds for refuting premises we associate with the Black Arts Movement and its companion Black Power.



However much I restrain myself from condemning HBO Native Son for complicity with the murky designs of resurging, international ,white supremacy, my aesthetic prejudices tempt me to condemn and to advocate resisting the social, political , and cultural traps of the neo-fascism which the tribe of Trump works assiduously to  valorize.



Jerry W Ward, Jr.              November 26, 2019