Richard Wright's "Lawd Today!" and the Political Uses of Modernism

Costello, Brannon

doi:10.2307/1512358

Cited by 22 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Indeed, although Ross notes, for example, that Philip Rahv and William Phillips refounded the Partisan Review in 1937 around a ‘modernist program’ and that, by 1942, Rahv considered ‘the growth of psychological science and, particularly, of psychoanalysis’ one of the major ways in which literature was recovering ‘its inwardness’ (ibid. : 167), she does not draw out the implications of the fact that Richard Wright actually served as an associate editor of Partisan Review in 1936 and, as Costello (2003: 42) argues, ‘doubtlessly followed the magazine's ideological discussions’. In his ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’, Wright (1994[1937]: 102) claimed that…”

Section: Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision

Fielder

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.

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Section: Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)mentioning

confidence: 99%