| One of the most recurring controversies concerning Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) as a coronation of the writer's exploration of the quest of self is whether Bigger's act, as an individual, results from a random act of violence and lack of cultural consciousness or whether this act is representative of an identifiable and relevant form of resistance to racial oppression.;On the other hand, Ayi Kwei Armah, in Fragments (1983), suggests that the return to the African community is a necessary step towards the construction of individual consciousness. This study seeks to illuminate the intersection between Fanon's phases of postcolonial consciousness, on the one hand, and Native Son and Fragments on the other.;Ultimately, I reach the conclusion that Native Son as an anticipation of Fanon requires a new reading in the light of this theory. There is a new need to revisit the constitutive elements of the nation, the nature of revolutionary violence and its effect on the perception of Bigger as a naturalist character. As for Armah, he critiques both Wright and Fanon by underscoring the necessary medium of the community as space of individual self actualization. Today, the new world order established by the political economy of the winners of the Cold War has generated a new breed of "wretched of the earth" who, unlike Bigger, can access the endless possibilities of on-line gatherings and redefine unsuspected identity markers and ways, not simply to "write back," to the center but to fight it back. |
