The Heat of Modernity: Race, Energy, and Violence in the 'Native Son' Manuscripts

In this paper, I draw upon the original ending of Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas describes his fatal experience in the electric chair, to reread the novel in light of Richard Wright’s rich engagement with energy. From his early days gleaning coal refuse to his later fascination with petro-power in the Global South, the American writer understood Black life and death as inseparable from the politics of fossil fuel. Native Son often makes this preoccupation manifest in critical terms. Bigger thus refuses to accept that only affluent whites should fly planes or enjoy efficient heating systems. Yet at several moment in the novel’s prison section, Wright moves beyond a Marxist critique of energy hegemony to have Bigger dream of a universal energy source—whether electrical or solar--that might inspire human connection across lines of race and class. This utopian vision haunts the uncorrected manuscript’s depiction of the execution, an almost abstract account of heat and light, but, as I demonstrate, the dream also informs the novel’s extant conclusion. Even as he sends Bigger to the electric chair, Wright refuses to disavow an Afro-futurist investment in energy solidarity.