Foregrounding the Quest for Lost Identity in Wright's Native Son

Abstract

This paper revisits Wright’s Native Son, a great yet controversial mid-twentieth century novel, by adopting the aspect of lost identity and its related perspectives in the sense that blacks living in America must have a sense for their bereft and violated identity and belonging. The sovereignty of white world among African-Americans undermines, obliterates, or ignores the established national borders, while large number of people are dispersed across wide geographical areas, and diasporas identities are formed along multiple geographical locations, the results of slavery, exile, or emigration. The diasporas identities are provided by a decoupling between the dominating power and people's real identities. These identities may develop along cosmopolitan, multi-racial and multilingual lines. They produce a pluralized identity among the people of such domain; they are subject to change the linguistic, ethnic, hence they will be marginalized and racial merger will make them quest their own real identity, because they have become the emptied-out shell. Consequently, these conditions provide extensive struggles among African-American people to gain their lost identities; it is transparently the same fact which the present study is to look for, in order to demonstrate and foreground some instances of the sense of lost identity, in Wright's Native Son.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n13p653