Youth Advocacy Against Dispossession in Richard Wright's Black Boy
- In Kokouvi Mawulé d'ALMIDA & Kodzo Kuma AHONDO (ed.), Emerging Voices: Youths and Children's Advocacy in Literature and Cinema : 9-37
Résumé
From the days of slavery through the post-independence period, Black Americans have been faced with rampant dispossession, notwithstanding the coming into force of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments respectively abolishing slavery, providing full citizenship, and ensuring legal protection for former slaves. This situation has ushered Black American writers into counter-dispossession writing. Such has been the case of Richard Wright who, through his autobiography titled Black Boy (1945), denounces dispossession and advocates for protest against it. This essay takes stock of the various forms of dispossession projected in the novel and analyses the Black American youth advocacy against them. In this respect, we revert to David Harvey's (2003) theorized concept of dispossession which contends that capitalism, to avoid its expected structural demise, has taken to accumulating by dispossessing other States and lower-class people to serve the dominant State or the bourgeois class. The study reveals multi-faceted dispossession in Black American lives, ranging from socio-economic, psycho-moral to politico-judicial ones, against which the young protagonist, Richard, deploys various strategies.
Mots-clés
Youth, dispossession, advocacy, the USA, Black Boy