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Un/Dressing Richard Wright
from Part II - Social and Cultural Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2021
In both his writings and appearance, Richard Wright was acutely attuned to the power of dress to convey meaning and build identity. From his early stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children, where the clothed and naked bodies of young Southern Black men signify poverty, innocence and, to whites, danger, through his late novel, Savage Holiday, where the naked body of a white man precipitates chaos and disaster, Wright’s attention to clothing and to the naked and nude bodies of Black and white men and women—including his meticulous self-presentation as an expatriate writer in Paris—allowed him to explore how attire and style produced sensations of self. The rituals of dressing (Lawd Today), the temptations of naked skin revealed beneath robes and coats (Native Son, The Outsider), the forms of nudity (“Big Boy Leaves Home,” Savage Holiday), the class dimensions of clothing (Black Boy) serve to display psychological and sociological forces of race, gender, sexuality, and power.
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