Outsider Citizens

Sarah Relyea is an Assistant Professor of English at National Central University, Taiwan. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her forthcoming publications include The Vanguardof Modernity: Richard Wright's The Outsider, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Psychoanalysisand The Second Sex: Simone de Beauvoir's Response toHelene Deutsch, in the Acts of the conference Simone deBeauvoir ritorna in Italia.

"Outsider Citizens examines the development of social constructionist concepts of race, gender, and sexuality in the decade after 1945. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together central figures in the post war theorizing of race and gender--Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir--to examine their common sources in a complex fusion of existentialism, psychoanalysis, and American sociology of race. Along with James Baldwin, Wright and Beauvoir turn to representations of embodies consciousness and social existence to analyze outsider status within democratic modernity. Beginning with wright's construction of black masculinity in "Native Son, Relyea also examines Beauvoir's use of, and dissent from, 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity, specifically those of Helen Deutsch. Finally, she examines the social construction of sexuality in Beauvoir and Baldwin, arguing that Giovanni's Room represents the undoing of a dominant American identity through the experience of exile and the return of the gaze, as the narrator confronts the sexual outsider within. All three writers offer the figure of the outsider to the modern citizen as a mirror, disclosing black alienation, immanence, and masochism, homophobia and betrayal.

Introduction Chapter 1 Internalizing the White Gaze: The Problem of Revolt in Native SonChapter 2 The Sociology of Race and the Making of The Second SexChapter 3 The Vanguard of Modernity: Richard Wright's The OutsiderChapter 4 Sexual Dialogics: Hegelian and Psychoanalytic Discourses in The Second SexChapter 5 Identity Undone: James Bladwin and the Destiny of America