It's in the Air: Racialized Space and the Diffuse Look from Wright to Beauvoir

Abstract: Building on scholarship that has demonstrated the deep intellectual exchanges between Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir, this article claims that Wright's conception of the division of space across the color line in Native Son deeply informs an evolution in Beauvoir's conception of the existentialist theory of the look. Before Beauvoir engaged with Wright, this theory was concentrated in one individual gaze, and in her novel L'invitée , it destabilized her characters' mental sense of themselves. In L'Amérique au jour le jour , written during her exchanges with Wright, Beauvoir paints the look as diffuse and social, and she characterizes it as something visceral that drills its way down into her phenomenological experience of her body. As this article claims, the timing of these changes is not a coincidence but rather reflects the way Wright's depiction of Bigger Thomas's sense of himself in a white supremacist world in Native Son influences Beauvoir's conception of oppression. For both Beauvoir and Wright, entering a racially forbidden space means feeling the weight of what I will call "the diffuse look," which limits consciousness by shunting certain possibilities into the realm of the imaginary, and which reinforces these stunted dreams by settling within the body itself.