In his controversial urban novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright inverts animal stereotypes often used by whites to characterize African Americans. While critics typically focus on Wright’s use of the ape in the novel, I examine the role of the rat. Not only does the rat act as a creaturely trope for the impoverished conditions of Bigger and his family, it exposes the arbitrary boundaries white landlords and city leaders used to contain African Americans living in the Black Belt tenements of the South Side, Chicago. In transgressing these boundaries, the rat becomes an environmental fugitive, modelling for Bigger a form of resistance to the racist social and economic practices that trap blacks in constricting environmental spaces. By connecting Bigger and the rat, Wright also highlights links between racism and forms of anthropocentrism in ways that critique typical understandings of what constitutes human and animal “pests.” Drawing upon Timothy Morton’s “the strange stranger” and Jill Bennett’s “critical empathy,” I argue that Bigger and the rat create an aesthetic encounter with otherness, offering readers an empathic experience that recognizes and accepts difference.

中文翻译：

---

“那个sonofabitch可能会割破你的喉咙”：理查德赖特的土生土长的儿子中的更大和黑老鼠

在他有争议的都市小说 Native Son (1940) 中，理查德·赖特 (Richard Wright) 颠倒了白人经常用来描述非裔美国人的动物刻板印象。虽然评论家通常关注赖特在小说中对猿的使用，但我研究了老鼠的角色。老鼠不仅是比格及其家人贫困状况的生物比喻，它还暴露了白人地主和城市领导人用来控制居住在芝加哥南区黑带矿区的非裔美国人的任意边界。越过这些界限，老鼠就变成了环境逃犯，为 Bigger 塑造了一种对种族主义社会和经济做法的抵抗形式，这种做法将黑人困在狭窄的环境空间中。通过连接 Bigger 和老鼠，赖特还强调了种族主义与人类中心主义形式之间的联系，批评了对构成人类和动物“害虫”的典型理解。借鉴蒂莫西莫顿的“奇怪的陌生人”和吉尔班尼特的“批判性同理心”，我认为更大和老鼠创造了一种与他者的审美相遇，为读者提供了一种识别和接受差异的同理心体验。