For reviews of Johnson’s film, see Troy Patterson, “A New Adaptation of ‘Native Son’ Reaches the Limits of What the Novel has to Offer,” New Yorker, April 5, 2019 →; Owen Gleiberman, “Sundance Film Review: ‘Native Son,’” Variety, January 25, 2019 →; and Monica Castillo, “Native Son,” RogerEbert.com, April 5, 2019 →. For Baldwin’s essay, see “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press, 2012).
Imani Perry, “The Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright,” The Atlantic, May 7, 2021 →.
Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Duke University Press, 1994).
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.
Peter Hudis, “Racism and the Logic of Capitalism: A Fanonion Reconsideration,” Historical Materialism blog, 2019 →.
Hannah Proctor, Burn Out: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024).
“Onward Barbarians,” Endnotes, 2020 →.
Wright uses the phrase “looking and feeling for a way out” to describe Bigger’s attempts to escape his conditions of dislocation and dispossession. “How Bigger Was Born,” in Native Son (Harper Perennial, 2005), 447.
Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” chap. 11 in Women, Class, Race (Vintage, 1983).
Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton University Press, 2014).
Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 22–23.
Perry, “The Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright.”
Ishmael Reed, “A New Flame for Black Fire,” New York Review of Books website, January 14, 2023.
Wright, Native Son, 52–53.
Wright, Native Son, 105–6.
Adam Schatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 155.
Eldridge Cleaver, “Notes on a Native Son,” in Soul on Ice (Delta Books, 1992).
Wright, Native Son, 311.
Wright, Native Son, 311.
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (John Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Wright, Native Son, 331.
Sylvia Wynter, ““No Humans Involved”: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, no. 1 (1994).
See chap. 15 in Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Question of Richard Wright (University of Illinois Press, 1993).
Wright, Native Son, 397, 400.
Wright, Native Son, 364.
Wright, Native Son, 289.
Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” 454.
G. M. Tamás, “Telling the Truth About Class,” Socialist Register, no. 42 (2006): 229–30.
Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius (Warner Books, 1988).
James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son, 34–35.
James Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard,” in Nobody Knows My Name (Vintage, 1993), 181–89.
Sarah Schulman, “Introduction to New Edition,” in After Delores (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), 7.
Jackie Wang, “Against Innocence,” Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, 2012, 147; Mohammed el-Kurd, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Books, 2025).
Daniel José Gaztambide, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology (Lexington Books, 2019).
Kevin Duong, “Broke Psychoanalysis” Parapraxis, no. 3 (2023).
Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” 448.
James Baldwin, “The Exile,” in Nobody Knows My Name, 191.
