Black Boy Revisited: Richard Wright’s Harbingers of Transracial Worldview

Black Boy has established Wright as one of the most insightful social critics of his time. Richard Wright’s Black Boy challenges the mainstream African American literature during 1930s and 1940s. It sets for a non-essentialist and transracial worldview in literature, a new trend to canonical American literature. He challenges prevailing dogmatic ideologies to explore and experience freedom, equality, and justice. As he describes in his autobiographical work Black Boy, he has been radicalized as being black. However, Wright stresses that he could not remain confined to the essentialist American view of nationality that associates race and participation in social networks to provide a national identification during that time. He resists to write and to observe the world from an essentialist African American perspective.