Black Boys and Native Sons

Black Boys and Native Sons

James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,”
attacking the kind of fiction, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son, that had been written about the ordeal of the American Negroes; and two years later he printed in the same magazine “Many Thousands Gone,” a tougher and more explicit polemic against Richard Wright and the school of naturalistic “protest” fiction that Wright represented. The protest novel, wrote Baldwin, is undertaken out of sympathy for the Negro, but through its need to present him merely as a social victim or a mythic agent of sexual prowess, it hastens to confine the Negro to the very tones of violence he has known all his life. Compulsively
reenacting and magnifying his trauma, the protest novel proves unable to transcend it. So choked with rage has this kind of writing become, it cannot show the Negro as a unique person or locate him as a member of a community with its own traditions and values, its own “unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life.” The failure
of the protest novel “lies in its insistence that it is {man’sl categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”…

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