Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

by Sarah Relyea

Outsider Citizens examines a foundational moment in the writing of race, gender, and sexuality––the decade after 1945, when Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and others sought to adapt existentialism and psychoanalysis to the representation of newly emerging public identities. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together Wright and Beauvoir to reveal their common sources and concerns. Relyea's discussion begins with Native Son and then examines Wright's postwar exile in France and his engagement with existentialism and psychoanalysis in The Outsider. Beauvoir met Wright during her postwar tour of America, chronicled in America Day by Day. After returning to France, Beauvoir adapted American social constructionist concepts of race as one source for her philosophical investigation of gender in The Second Sex, while also rejecting 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity. Relyea examines later representations of race and gender in a discussion of James Baldwin's critique of postwar American liberalism and ideals of innocence and masculinity in Giovanni's Room, which represents the remaking of white American identity through the risks of exile and the return of the gaze.

204 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2005

About the author

Sarah Relyea is the author of Playground Zero, a novel set in the late 1960s. Sarah grew up in Berkeley during the counterculture movement of the 1960s. As a young girl, she went to the infamous Altamont concert and frequented Telegraph Avenue. She would soon swap California's psychedelic scene for studying English literature at Harvard. A PhD who has taught at universities in New York and Taiwan, she has long addressed questions of identity in her writing, including in her book of literary criticism, Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin. Sarah lives in Brooklyn, New York, but she spends time in Northern California.