The Prison Chronotope in Richard Wright’s Native Son

Abstract: With a starting point in the persistent presence of imprisonment in African American life, this article revisits Richard Wright’s iconic novel Native Son (1940), to show how it can contribute to the critical conversation around incarceration today. Notwithstanding the horrific thematic of the novel, and despite suggestions of writers such as James Baldwin and Addison Gayle Jr. that it does little more than mirror horror, the article argues that the way in which the novel brings layers of imprisonment into view contributes to recognizing the challenges to individual as well as collective agency in the light of perennial racial incarceration.