Quest for African American Cultural Identity in Wright’s The Native Son

Abstract

This research on Richard Wright's Native Son (1840) inherently studies the African American cultural identity of black people in American. Native Son which is a story of a young black boy, Bigger, who kills an American girl accidently and is sentenced to death in an unfair trail, is viewed as a masterpiece that questions the presuppositions that have been postulated by the imperialistic societies. This project also identifies the cultural heritage of African American. The Protagonist Bigger as the representative of the society wants to preserve her own native culture. He advocates for his own language and ritual practices to establish his cultural identity against mainstream culture. Thematically and structurally Native Son is dominated by struggle for freedom from all forms of oppression and realization of full potentiality of one's complex bicultural identity as an African American. At the end, violence is stronger force; it gives the real consciousness to Bigger as an individual to perceive his cultural identity even at the time of death.