Page 68 - Culture Society and Economy

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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

oppression of Mississippi – ’the bottom South’ as Bontemps specifies it,
and the tragedies and atrocities which capitalist deracination threw up in
that rural and small town locale. Therefore, had he remained in the North
in the United States, Wright would not necessarily have resolved his alien-
ation. For new social processes were now unfolding, shifting the center of
gravity of the drama of black struggle to a new locale different from the
one he so deeply knew, felt so keenly, and depicted so vividly in his work.
The failure to understand Richard Wright is yet another instance of a lack
of social and historical specificity in Gilroy’s work which renders it highly
problematic.

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