Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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Space and Capital in Richard Wright's Native Son and Twelve Million Black Voices / Bill V. Mullen

"The working men have no country."

-- Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto

<1> David Harvey has challenged Marxist criticism after Marx to think more about space. Harvey reminds us that "through the development of explicit bourgeois strategies of divide and control . . . all manner of class, gender, and other social divisions" are implanted into the "geographical landscape of capitalism" (40). "Divisions such as those between cities and suburbs, between regions as well as between nations cannot be understood as residuals from some ancient order," he writes. "They are actively produced through the differentiating powers of capital accumulation and market structures" (40). Harvey is one of a number of Marxist theorists to note that contemporary capitalism operates by a spatial logic of expansion and penetration, on one hand, and concentration and restriction on the other. From this perspective, the pursuit of Persian Gulf Oil across a war-deployed Iraq, to the highly privatized rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, represent moments of contest over both the spaces of capital and the putatively 'public' sphere where capitalism is lived out by workers, citizens and other subjects. Indeed, in the work of such contemporary thinkers as Gaston Bachelard, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Henri Lebevre and others, contemporary critical theory has urged us to construct a spatial anatomy of the modern as a means of thinking through notions of public and private spheres, the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony, and taxonomies of race, gender, class and nation. [1 ]

<2> What is the legacy of the Old Left for our thinking about the dominance and resilience of capitalist spaces? What contributions did Old Left public intellectuals make under the auspices of Marxian, proletarian and working-class cultural thought to our historical understandings of spatialized capitalism and to thinking resistance to capital as a spatial problematic? In this essay I will analyze two books by Richard Wright, Native Son, published in 1940, and Twelve Million Black Voices, published in 1941, as textualizations of space in historical transition from what one mode of production (sharecropper agrarianism) to another (industrial capitalism). I will argue that Wright's representations of Chicago and urban industrial locations in Native Son and Twelve Million Black Voices reveal a dialectical ambivalence about capitalist modernity owing to the rapidity with which it creates modes of accumulation and social relationships that challenge the ability of the working-class to 'think them' and hence unite against them. This problematic is rendered consistently as a contest over space. Indeed, I will propose that it is precisely a Marxist understanding of capitalism's aggressive deployment of spaces that helps us understand the impact of capitalism on African Americans in Wright's work who are undergoing migration from south to north, a process Wright himself described in spatial terms as a move into the "sphere of conscious history." I will argue that Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices represent dialectical and complementary views of the effects of capitalism on the human experience of space: in the former, Bigger Thomas experiences a logic of spatial reification that ultimately defines and determines the fatal social relationships of his life and his delimited political consciousness. In the latter, history is imagined as proletarianized public sphere won through the forced and voluntary assemblage of mass and class consciousness. Hence in Native Son, the capitalization of space is both linked to and a metaphor for alienation and defeat. In 12 Million Black Voices, capitalism is imagined as a tabula rasa upon which a 'new' consciousness of revolution can be produced.

<3> My essay will argue in conclusion that in this, the 100 anniversary of the year of his birth, we should re-consider as part of Richard Wright's legacy his profound and provocative analysis of space under modern capitalism as one of his, and by extension the Old Left's, important critical legacies. I will argue that Wright's work is particularly important for understanding the racializing effects of capitalism through the production and segregation of space, effects which both mimic and reinforce the divisive managerial strategies of capitalist regimes. For just as contemporary Marxist theory has returned us to Marx's original theory of capitalist expansion to understand neoliberalism and contemporary imperialism, so returning to Wright can help us see anew the history of the role of race in the making of the map of contemporary capitalism. Wright, one might even say, stands at the crossroads of these historical understandings.

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<4> In "How Bigger Was Born," his reflective commentary on the writing of Native Son, Richard Wright recalls reading a pamphlet describing their walk down a London street by Vladimir Lenin and Maxim Gorky. "Lenin turned to Gorky," Wright writes, "and pointing, exclaimed in quick succession: "Here is their Big Ben;" "There is their Westminster Abbey." "There is their library." Wright abruptly insists that the moment of reading produced an epiphany contributive towards what he calls "the Bigger Thomas reaction," to his own native environment, the city of Chicago:

In both instances the deep sense of exclusion was identical. The feeling of looking at things with a painful and unwarrantable nakedness was an experience, I learned, that transcended national and racial boundaries. It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where the look of a world which one did not make or own struck one with a blinding objectivity and tangibility, that made me grasp the revolutionary impulse in my life and the lives of those about me and far away (518).

<5> Wright's conflation of reactions suggests a number of things about the function of Chicago in his work. First, the city had become by the time of his writing of the novel a symbol for Wright of the unifying geography of the modern. The endpoint for his own as well as thousands of Black migrants from the South in the first half of the century, Chicago was for Wright a sign of differential, or uneven development under capitalism. In his 1981 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman articulates this problematic as one in which subjects of capitalist underdevelopment (in this case 19th century Russians) "experienced modernization as something that was not happening; or else as something that was happening far away . . . experienced more as fantastic anti-worlds than as social actualities" (175). Berman captures in a differential register subaltern alienation as literally a spatial exclusion, what Wright calls, metaphorically, "living on a plane of social reality." Yet paradoxically in the passage cited above, it is also the "blinding objectivity and tangibility" of the spatialized modern - the capitalist city itself - which *produces* the consciousness necessary in order to re-imagine new social relations in the modern world. Both of these tendencies of modern experience are evident in Wright's writing on the migration. In Native Son, Chicago's South Side is rendered as a privatized terrain of capital which in turns atomizes consciousness and embodies alienation, while in 12 Million Black Voices the urban industrial north is viewed as a vortex of global proletarianization that exceeds the geographic boundaries of city, state or even nation.

<6> Native Son famously tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20 year-old African American male living on Chicago's South Side during the period of the Great Depression. Thomas's family, we are told, has migrated from South to North before the opening action of the novel. His father has been killed in a southern race riot prior to their arrival. Repeatedly, Wright attends to the spatial dimensions of Bigger's life. The novel fairly overtly associates the public spaces and streets of Chicago (movie theaters, pool halls, the South Side streets) as relative (because segregated) zones of free movement for Bigger, as long as he doesn't cross the 'color' line onto private property held by whites (like Blums, the stores Bigger and his friends are afraid to rob). The book also uses metaphors of confinement and restriction throughout to suggest Bigger's partial or delimited freedom: he is often described as trapped in his own skin, literally and figuratively, and can only gaze out at wide open spaces (like the sky overhead) as figures of unattainable personal and social desire. Yet to best grasp the social logic of the novel's representations of the specifically capitalist dimensions of space in Native Son, I will concentrate, following Henri Lebevre, on three sites in the book: "(1) biological reproduction (the family); (2); the production of labour power (the working class per se); and (3) the production of the social relations of production" (32). These sites conform in the novel to three settings for action: first, the kitchenette apartment building occupied by Bigger Thomas and his family; second, the Dalton home where Bigger works at his first (and only) job in the novel; third, the prison cell, where Bigger spends the majority of the novel.

<7> Native Son begins with the mechanical sound of an alarm clock filling the desultory room of a kitchenette apartment occupied by Bigger Thomas, his mother, a domestic worker, and his younger brother Buddy and sister Vera. Geographically, the apartment is located on Chicago's South Side. It is leased to the Thomases by Mr. Dalton, a real estate developer who owns numerous properties across the city. Historically, the kitchenette apartment functioned as an advance in the technology of real estate exploitation of Blacks in Chicago. Kitchenettes were formerly large houses or mansions, often owned by whites, subdivided into smaller units, often two or three bedroom, without private bath, and rented at exorbitant rates to new black immigrants to the city. In Twelve Million Black Voices, Wright made the kitchenette the anchoring point of his interpretive thesis regarding the economic transition for Blacks caught up in the Great Migration. The move from southern sharecropper agrarian economy to northern industrial center was symbolized for Wright as a move from one regime of capitalist administration ("Lords of the Land") to another ("Bosses of the Building"). "The kitchenette is the author of the glad tidings that new suckers are in town, ready to be cheated, plundered, and put in their places," he wrote. "The kitchenette is our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in its ceaseless attacks" (105-106).

<8> Using what one might call the logic of reification, Wright literally anthropomorphizes the kitchenette as the social relationships that determine Black life under capitalism. The real estate market is personified as the institutionalization of social violence experienced by African Americans in a wide range of social locations, from the lynch mob to the courthouse. The kitchenette, one might say, is a disciplinary space in Native Son, specifically intended to mark both class and race restriction. Wright makes this explicit in the novel by making Mr. Dalton not just the Thomas landlord, but Bigger's employer. Like a monopoly capitalist, or racist realtor, the novel generates an isomorphic relationship between the restricted place of Bigger's living and the limited occupational space of his work. This strategy of representation bespeaks both the causal link between restrictive real estate covenants and segregation in cities like Chicago, and the division of labor under capitalism along racial lines. It suggests social space as both a real and metonymic index to the "place" of migrant African Americans under industrial capitalism.

<9> This is underscored when Bigger enters the Dalton home a prospective servant as a chauffeur. The massive white mansion is a spatial embodiment of the landlord-tenant, employer-employee relationship between the Thomases and Daltons and the surplus extraction endemic to both. It is also significantly the Dalton home where Bigger will kill Mary Dalton after returning from driving her and her boyfriend Jan around town. Though the killing is an accident motivated by Bigger's terror that he will be found out in her bedroom, the location of the murder bespeaks Bigger's social fate accompli. Just as the kitchenette signifies for Wright the "death sentence without a trial," the Dalton bedroom is the primal scene in Native Son of exclusionary white private property ownership. Mary Dalton symbolizes this by herself. Despite his efforts after killing her, Bigger can no more burn away Mary's unavailable body as evidence of his propertyless existence than the Dalton mansion will tumble to the ground. The economic foundation of the latter, we are meant to see, is built upon or extracted from his social depravity. Structurally, then, the novel causally links the claustrophia of Bigger's confinement in the Dalton bedroom, its racialized and sexualized taboo of miscegenation, and his restricted economic position in the novel back to the "lynch" logic signified by the restricted kitchenette. We are meant to hear physical and spatial echoes of the former in the closed space of the Dalton bedroom. At the same time, Bigger's isolation in the Dalton bedroom, like his physical segregation in the kitchenette, figures his separation (or division) from members of his own class and race. He is literally closed off and hemmed in from any social relations that might extricate him from his tragedy. This is his tragedy. This aspect of Native Son marks a crucial difference from the presentation of space in 12 Million Black Voices, as we shall see.

<10> Completing the spatial logic of the novel, the cell awaiting Bigger in part three of the book is the kitchenette as "prison" made literal. As with the kitchenette, Bigger's solitary confinement anthropomorphizes his crime as his social and existential destiny. Indeed, prison functions dialectically in the novel to provide an ironic gloss on the passage with which I began this essay about Lenin and Gorky's encounter with the public space of London streets. It is his prison cell which provides Bigger the "deep sense of exclusion" from the modern capitalist state; which strikes him with a "painful and unwarrantable nakedness" of the meaning of the objective world he has not made and cannot own; and which makes him "grasp the revolutionary impulse" of his life (518). Bigger's death at the hands of the state is the final social product of an expedient capitalist logic of exclusionary and racist accumulation rendered as the homological structure of a novel which moves him across three infinitely repeatable arrangements of spatial exclusion: "Fear. Flight. Fate." This "No Man's Land" (Wright's phrase) is capitalism's geographical landscape in Native Son. This spatial metaphor also articulates Bigger's unfinished, or existential, consciousness. His isolation is a metonymy for a partial understanding - one might call it false consciousness - which removes him from a collective, and possibly redemptive, consciousness of his race and class. Bigger's "no man" status is as an island of existential isolation he embraces as the "meaning" of his solitary life.

<11> Native Son famously includes a long explanatory appeal of the symbolism of Bigger's life by the Communist Party lawyer Boris Max, who describes him as one of "12 Million" Black Americans capable of being caught up in a racist state legal apparatus. Max's attempts to make Bigger's life symbolic of Black masses is also an effort to make his experience representative of a public as opposed to private sphere of Black experience. In spatial terms, Max is attempting to write Bigger's isolation and imprisonment onto a larger historical map of the Black diaspora. One might call it an attempt to see the landscape of capitalism, its contours and spatial designs, the relationships of its parts to its wholes, or one what might call capitalist totality. This rhetorical gesture also points to the conceptual differences of space between Native Son and the book 12 Million Black Voices. The latter book is an extended essay on the migration voiced as a first person plural account ("we") endeavoring to represent some collective experience - a literal totality, in a Marxist sense of that term - of black migration experienced in words and images (the book is a collaboration between Wright and Farm Security Administration photographer Edwin Rosskam). The difference lies primarily in the book's imagination of space as a public "sphere" produced by the collective consciousness of black and interracial labor. Wright literally imagines the consequences of the African American migration north as a physical shift from pre-modern to modern spatiality, with the African American working class as its 'epicenter.' The book's image of this totality is a "vortex" or swirling center:

In the main, we black folk earn our living in two ways in the northern cities: we work as domestics or as laborers . . . .But it is in industry that we encounter experiences that tend to break down the structure of our folk characters and project us toward the vortex of modern life. It is when we are handling picks rather than mops, it is when we are swinging hammers rather than brooms, it is when we are pushing levers rather than dust-clothes that we are gripped by and influenced by the world-wide forces that shape and mold the life of Western civilization. (117)

<12> In contradiction to Native Son, the formula for social space in Twelve Million Black Voices is labor plus time, or put another way, material history. History is imagined as a temporal sphere of increasing Black participation, presence and understanding of the place of the proletariat in the making of modern capitalism. Black people embody and are embodied in space and time via their proletarianization. "Imagine European history from the days of Christ to the present telescoped into three hundred years and you can comprehend the drama which our consciousness has experienced!" writes Wright. "Brutal, bloody, crowded with suffering and abrupt transitions, the lives of us black folk represent the most magical and meaningful picture of human experience in the Western world. Hurled from our native African homes into the very center of the most complex and highly industrialized civilization the world has ever known, we stand today with a consciousness and memory such as few people possess" (146). Labor deterritorialization, here slavery, is the vehicle for understanding capital's global geography, its "world-wide forces that shape and mold the life of Western civilization." Wright's description of the arc of Black life suggests Trotsky's interpretation of the fate of "backward" or pre-capitalist societies suddenly encountering capitalist development. Against the universal law of uneven development, Trotsky proposes "combined development" as "a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms" (27). In order to articulate this differential consciousness, Wright significantly uses a metaphor wedding temporality to spatiality, as a means of signaling totality. Twelve Million Black Voices concludes with an image of history as a "common road of hope" traveled by workers both black and white, north and south, ancient and modern. The book's final metaphor, itself a spatial one, is for that most fantastic of Marxist geographic imaginings, the meeting point of all the world's workers. Wright appropriately names it the "crossroads," a fluid and mobile metaphor of ever-changing social relations: "Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall be with them . . . ." (147) The book answers the Marxist problematic of conceiving borderless and boundaryless solidarities generated by the same processes of exploitation that threatens to keep workers forever in the harness. Black migration is rendered as a global flow of labor into an ever-expanding site of human solidarity, a nation of workers that is not one. The book opposes spatial segregation and isolation (Native Son) to public union of working-class interests. This is the spatial subtext of what Wright calls in 12 Million Black Voices the "sphere" of conscious history.

***

<13> Richard Wright's place as an essential thinker about the modern has been assured by critical tradition, as has his place as one of the essential Marxist-influenced writers of the 20th century. Yet as I hope to have shown in this essay, he also has much to contribute if we are to advance our current academic and political interest in developing what David Harvey calls an "historical-geographical materialism." Such a theory would place the examination of space and geography at the center of our understandings of both the modern and capitalist processes. It would necessarily re-center the experience of geographical movements, like internal migrations, and link them to transnational and border-crossing tendencies of both capital and labor. So we might re-visit the African American migration via Wright's work as a prelude and precedent to contemporary labor migrations within and across national boundaries.

<14> Wright was also one of the first of 20th century American writers to insist, as he tell us in "How Bigger Was Born," that the local fate of characters like Bigger Thomas was an index to the plight of serfs in Russia, proletarians in Germany and Japan. Wright's imagination of capitalism, in other words, was always transnational, or what he would have called, in his time, internationalist. Attention to the spatial demarcations of capital in the period of the Old Left necessarily hence reminds us of the roots of contemporary political struggles, like anti-globalization, and the unfinished Marxist project of liberating the working class from capital's brutal tendencies towards uneven development, segregation and disunity. Too, Wright's work on space and migration under capitalism reminds us of the universality of capital's spatial experiences to this day: of the ever-determined and defined modes of de and re-territorialization; of the productive and destructive violence of questing for work; of repetitious acts of accumulation and exchange across the planet.

<15> Finally, reading Richard Wright to understand capital and space would also force more of our attention to the geography of race. Despite its tendency to seek out markets of exchange and modes of accumulation irrespective of ethnicity, Wright's work recalls to us that specific forms of capitalist development, like the rise of northern industrial U.S. economy, depended heavily on the forced and voluntary movements of racialized populations into increasingly concentrated and restricted spheres. Such a perspective casts new light on oft-studied sites of the modern, like Chicago, and more reclusive or occluded locations yet to be mapped by scholars, including new ethnicized enclaves across the U.S. and globally. It would allow us to see the rise of contemporary (segregated) American cities as paradigmatic of the rise of new megacities globally, where capital has forced the extraordinary concentration of human labor into increasing shrinking quarters. [2 ] Indeed Wright's books should be re-visited with a keener understanding of just how crucial yet contingent his (and our) relationship to modern urban spaces in particular can be. For Wright, Chicago in particular, and the urban industrial northern U.S. were, in the most multivalent sense of the word, sites for Richard Wright to think about space and time in its myriad means and forms as they related to the struggle for human freedom. For Wright, the real meaning of thinking about space lie in its ability to destroy the provincializing tendency of capital to divide and rule not just the working class but its ideas about itself. In this, his narrative accounts of space made possible what Marshall Berman lyrically calls a "fantastic anti-worlds" that have yet to be won.

Works Cited

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press, 200.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. London: Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow: 1952.

Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. London: Pluto Press, 1977.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

---. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1988.

Notes

[1] See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). See also Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, J. J. Shapiro (trans.). (Boston: Beacon. German, 1968a, 1969); See finally Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). [^]

[2] For a recent critical analysis of race and space see Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Eds. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods. (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007). [^]

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