Richard Wright Book

Advance praise for Abdul JanMohamed's forthcoming book The Death-bound-subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology Of Death.

“This is a path-breaking, imaginative, comprehensive, indeed magisterial, analysis of the ways in which death functions in the construction of black subjectivities in Richard Wright’s fiction, autobiographies, and journalism. It both expands our understanding of Wright’s achievement and models a way in which the specter of violence, lynching, and death may be seen to shadow and shape a trajectory of African American cultural production.” 

—Valerie Smith, Chair, African-American Studies Department, Princeton University, author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings

“Abdul JanMohamed reworks the concept of ‘social death’ to read Richard Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and psychoanalysis along the way, to rewrite ‘lordship and bondage’ as the ‘death contract’ and to discern the precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its detailed consideration of Wright’s corpus, its theoretical ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigms it offers for rethinking slavery, death, and resistance.” 

—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott Professor at the University of California, Berkeley

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