Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

by Sarah Relyea

Overview of Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

Outsider Citizens examines a foundational moment in the writing of race, gender, and sexuality––the decade after 1945, when Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and others sought to adapt existentialism and psychoanalysis to the representation of newly emerging public identities. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together Wright and Beauvoir to reveal their common sources and concerns. Relyea's discussion begins with Native Son and then examines Wright's postwar exile in France and his engagement with existentialism and psychoanalysis in The Outsider. Beauvoir met Wright during her postwar tour of America, chronicled in America Day by Day. After returning to France, Beauvoir adapted American social constructionist concepts of race as one source for her philosophical investigation of gender in The Second Sex, while also rejecting 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity. Relyea examines later representations of race and gender in a discussion of James Baldwin's critique of postwar American liberalism and ideals of innocence and masculinity in Giovanni's Room, which represents the remaking of white American identity through the risks of exile and the return of the gaze.

Synopsis of Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

Outsider Citizens examines the development of social constructionist concepts of race, gender, and sexuality in the decade after 1945. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together central figures in the post war theorizing of race and gender--Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir--to examine their common sources in a complex fusion of existentialism, psychoanalysis, and American sociology of race. Along with James Baldwin,Wright and Beauvoir turn to representations of embodies consciousness and social existence to analyze outsider status within democratic modernity. Beginning with wright's construction of black masculinity in Native Son, Relyea also examines Beauvoir's use of, and dissent from, 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity, specifically those of Helen Deutsch. Finally, she examines the social construction of sexuality in Beauvoir and Baldwin, arguing that Giovanni's Room represents the undoing of a dominant American identity through the experience of exile and the return of the gaze, as the narrator confronts the sexual outsider within. All three writers offer the figure of the outsider to the modern citizen as a mirror, disclosing black alienation, immanence, and masochism, homophobia and betrayal.

About the Author, Sarah Relyea

Sarah Relyea is an Assistant Professor of English at National Central University, Taiwan. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her forthcoming publications include The Vanguard of Modernity: Richard Wright's The Outsider, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Psychoanalysis and The Second Sex: Simone de Beauvoir's Response to Helene Deutsch, in the Acts of the conference Simone de Beauvoir ritorna in Italia.

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