A picture of moral agency: Subduing the victim in Richard Wright's prose, film, and photography

My dissertation argues that Richard Wright's fictional portrayal of the African American's transformation from sentimental victim to moral agent reflects the writer's own evolution between 1938 and 1960 as a black American intellectual. From first to last fictional work, Wright's increasingly sophisticated characters negotiate their racial status in white-dominated environments that Wright never supports but depicts less harshly as he ages. Additionally, Wright's midlife confrontation with white Hollywood and black Africa, through film and photography, respectively, compelled him to represent African Americans more positively. By linking the moral development of Wright's characters to his aesthetic interests and the popular-culture idioms of film and photography, my interdisciplinary approach is unique in its analysis of the author's expanding literary framework throughout his professional life. No scholar to date has done close readings, in one manuscript, of Wright's photography and film, specifically in relation to victimization and agency.;Concentrating on the opening autobiographical sketch and two novellas in Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Chapter One initially finds the desperate African American victim subversively miming minstrel behavior to survive but finally winning back power with political activism. Chapter Two's focus on film, particularly the unpublished Melody Limited (1944) and uncensored Native Son (1950) movies, traces the gradual metamorphosis of the African American entertainer into an agent fighting the White world on behalf of civil rights. Chronicling Wright's experience in Ghana, Chapter Three's examination of selected photographs in Black Power (1954) reveals how Wright converts discomfort with his African ancestry into an advocacy of modernized Africa. Chapter Four's investigation of A Father 's Law (2008), Wright's posthumously published novel, uncovers the psychological complexity of troubled characters successful in the White world but suffering from a rigid adherence to moral absolutes. My dissertation concludes that the fading of the sentimental victim in Wright's work leaves behind a moral agent so heavily burdened by inner turmoil that he functions poorly in an environment less racially oppressive.