VISIONS OF INVISIBILITY: LITERATURE AS PROTEST AND SOCIAL CRITICISM IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON

Abstract

African-American literature stands out for its interest in using the literary field as a way to protest and mainly to denounce social contexts marked by the use of oppression and violence. In this context, stands out in the literary scenario the novel Native Son (1940), written by the African-American writer Richard Wright, who describes through its protagonist Bigger Thomas, the painful details and psychological problems that characterize the black experience in a social context marked by oppression and violence. So, the present paper aims at developing some considerations about the African-American experience depicted in Richard Wright’s novel during the racial segregation period and attempts to examine how the social context interferes in its protagonist’s psychology. To do so, we based our analysis on the studies developed by Brookshaw (1983), Bhabha (1998), Woodward (2009) e Silva (2009).