The Marxist and Postmodern Representation of the Subaltern: : Capitalist Othering in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Richard Wright’s Native Son examines the marginalization of Black Americans in the United States in the forties. In addition, Aravind Adiga adapts the Booker prize winning novel The White Tiger from Wright’s novel; however, The White Tiger depicts a postcolonial capitalist India in the twenty-first century. Despite the adaptation, Wright composed Native Son in 1940 when Marxism existed as a potential solution to the marginalization of Black Americans under a capitalist system; in turn, Wright depicts marginalization by applying social realism to produce a socially didactic text that promotes Marxism. However, James Baldwin criticized Wright’s reliance on social realism and argued that Wright’s text fails to envision a future without marginalization. In contrast, Adiga wrote The White Tiger in 2008 following the rise of global capitalism and postmodern literary aesthetics, and in so doing, nihilistically and amorally examines the marginalization that results from capitalism. However, comparing Wright and Adiga’a texts reveals the correlation between capitalist oppression and colonialism despite both texts occurring during periods of post colonization. Furthermore, by analyzing the main characters’ problematic and violent actions in each text, Wright and Adiga suggest that toxic subaltern masculinity stems from the effects of oppression. In so doing, comparing both texts reveals both the twenty-first century postmodern and social realist responses towards capitalist oppression. Department: English Faculty Mentor: Dr. Sara Grewal and Dr. David Hollingshead
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".