Masters Thesis

James Baldwin and Richard Wright: divergence and confluence

When going through the portal of photography, James Baldwin and Richard Wright find similar themes in American racial politics despite situating themselves differently in their photo-texts. Baldwin's Nothing Personal (1964) and Wright's 72 Million Black Voices (1941) argue for the potential power of human connection in achieving American racial equality. Wright directly grounds his texts in the U.S. Farm Services Administration funded photographs, while Baldwin uses Richard Avedon's portraits as backdrops for a text in which he questions the myths underscoring the pictures' American hegemony. Both approaches reflect the differing states of race relations at the time of the texts' creation; however, both authors consistently find that the path forward for white Americans and African-Americans is to see and accept the shared history that built the nation but segregated its people. Finding moments when both sets of texts and photographs engage in joint arguments against discrimination only strengthens the plea for equality in 12 Million Black Voices and Nothing Personal.

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