The Death-Bound-Subject

“The Death-Bound-Subject provides a sympathetic and productive reading of Wright's life-long negotiation with the racist dialectics of death he saw thriving, after slavery's abolition, under the aegis of Jim Crow. The study's merit for Wright scholarship should be obvious as we celebrate, in 2008, the centennial of the author's birth. . . . Moreover, at a time when monographs concentrating on a single author are notoriously difficult to publish and market, JanMohamed's volume provides an incisive example of how, at its best, the single-author book makes a considerable contribution to the broader concerns of literary and critical theory.” - Mikko Tuhkanen, Postmodern Culture

“[A]n impressive scholarly and theoretical achievement. . . .The Death-Bound-Subject should become an important work not only for Richard Wright scholarship in particular, but for African American studies and theorizations of subjectivity in general.” - Jeffrey Atteberry, Modern Fiction Studies

“JanMohamed is no crude formalist: his stylistic and narratological analyses are genuinely illuminating and have lots of interesting things to say about the symptomatic repetitions of Wright’s fictions. At such moments The Death-Bound-Subject is an impressive scholarly addition to Wright studies and to black psychoanalytic cultural theory more generally.” - David Marriott, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“JanMohamed’s is a book worthy of the most serious reflection and debate, a work that critics and graduate students will turn to as a model of substantive revisionism and theoretical rigor. . . Should African American studies continue in its pursuit of rendering the vagaries of death intellectually legible, the field should turn to this book as one of its signal events.” - Rolland Murray, Novel

“The value of this book, and the success of JanMohamed’s argument, is the welding of bare life and slavery to produce the death-bound subject.” - Theofanis Verinakis, Social Identities

“Abdul JanMohamed reworks the concept of ‘social death’ to read Richard Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and psychoanalysis along the way to rethink ‘lordship and bondage’ as the ‘death contract’ and to discern the precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its detailed consideration of Wright’s corpus, its theoretical ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigms it offers for rethinking slavery, death, and resistance.” - Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley

“This is a path-breaking, imaginative, comprehensive, indeed magisterial, analysis of the ways in which death functions in the construction of black subjectivities in Richard Wright’s fiction, autobiographies, and journalism. It both expands our understanding of Wright’s achievement and models a way in which the spectre of violence, lynching, and death may be seen to shadow and shape a trajectory of African American cultural production.” - Valerie Smith, author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings