“The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published as a short story in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An American Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and again posthumously in Wright’s 1961 short story collection Eight Men (Literary Classics 22). This version of the narrative begins with an unnamed protagonist already on the run from the police. The audience is left to infer the...
“Archive,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” This definition not only locates them within a particular physical space, but also within the bounds of what is considered “important” and “historic”. This raises a few questions: who determines what is important enough to be in an archive? What...
Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, published by Duke University Press, examines various representations of Black life including the literary, cinematic, visual, and everyday life experiences of Black people. She offers a cipher to navigate the unspeakable and unknowable realities of existing in the violent afterlives of transatlantic slavery. To live while Black in...