Writing as resistance: racial identity and authenticity in Richard Wright’s Black Boy

This paper interrogates the philosophical and literary foundations of naturalism in order to examine its fraught entanglement with race, determinism and resistance. Richard Wright’s Black Boy emerges as a pivotal intervention. The paper reads Wright’s autobiography as an exploration of how racial ideology is reproduced through institutions and everyday life. Wright depicts Black existence as precarious within a biopolitical order. Yet, his naturalism resists romanticisation and reverse essentialism. By refusing simplification, Wright destabilises the Black/White binary. Writing becomes both an analytic method and a political weapon, exemplifying Black naturalism as resistance and reclaiming agency within structures that seek to deny it.