Richard Wright’s Mission

Some readers of Wright’s work have criticized him for failing to portray healthy human connection or solidarity. In her chapter, Marilyn Nissim-Sabbat maintains that Wright was deeply aware that people could only live as human beings through meaningful relations with one another. Wright understood both that the human need for solidarity runs deep and that the ability to forge it can be damaged. Without such solidarity, alienation from oneself and others will crush “Bigger” and Bigger-like characters on the South Side of Chicago and globally. Wright therefore championed the healing made possible by qualitatively enlarging our lived-experience of and with one another. Essential to articulating and acting on this need is a critical theory of transcendence that is implicit in Wright’s work. Such a theory emerges in this essay through a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s views on identity politics and cross-group identity in The Second Sex as contrasted with parallel discussions by Wright in Native Son.

Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite

Originally published in October 1935, Richard Wright describes the immediate aftermath of black boxer Joe Louis’s victory over then white champion Max Baer. On the South Side of Chicago, thousands of black people flooded into public spaces in celebration of a moment’s racial victory, an exceptional instance of black triumph over white. Taking strength from Louis’s strength, spontaneously assembled masses of black people felt temporarily and collectively free and invincible. They shook the hands of strangers in unleashed joy and stopped streetcars. Wright thought this cyclone of celebration exhibited a pent-up black folk consciousness that was hungry for freedom, an emboldened energy that could be harnessed and channeled politically. Although soon subsiding, these desires that had long been suppressed had been uncovered in Joe Louis’s victory.

Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana

Kevin Kelly Gaines’s reprinted essay on Wright’s Black Power reminds readers that Wright rejected the myth of a transhistorical, transnational black cultural unity. On this point, Wright’s thinking converged with that of other black Marxist intellectuals in exile, including Padmore and James. Wright instead proposed a form of pan-Africanism founded on a shared history of oppression and a critical, dialectical consciousness of the situation of blacks in the West. The latter would have to give pride of place to the emergent political consciousness of African people, even if some of its elements would be radically foreign to New World black people. Bridging the historical differences would not prove impossible, however. After all, as Gaines observes, by the time Wright’s first daughter, Julia, reached adulthood, she had joined the black expatriate community in Ghana. It had supplanted Paris for intellectuals and artists seeking to join a black-led struggle informed by global ideals of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

Wright’s Afromodern Search for Political Freedom

Lewis R. Gordon argues that Wright’s writings cast light on the suffocating world produced by colonialism, enslavement, and racism, in which black people are treated as if they simply don’t matter. Wright showed that blacks in the United States are fundamentally historically excluded from the political, aesthetic, and epistemic institutions of the only world to which they are indigenous. By pulling readers into places “they wished never to go,” he demonstrated how the erosion of black political power in fact increased political impotence among humankind. Wright, argues Gordon, was particularly prescient about the relationship between the racist state and twentieth-century fascism. They jointly eradicate conditions of political appearance and freedom, replacing them with unilateral rule.

Introduction

The introduction outlines major periods in Richard Wright’s intellectual life, emphasizing the similarities between the historical moment in which he wrote and the post-Obama period in which this text is being published. It also explains the thematic organization of the text into five sections focused, respectively, on radical politics, sexuality and gender, black internationalism, the range of genres in which Wright wrote, and on using Wright’s ideas to address contemporary black political struggles. Running through the text is an exploration of how Wright thought one could build more inclusive forms of solidarity across gender and national lines through careful attention to the distinct but related expressions of capitalist and imperialist exploitation. For Wright, the starting point was always the life worlds of the black masses whose liberation it was the task of the black writer to advance.

Slavery Continued, Freedom Sought

Jane Anna Gordon argues that Wright, while stressing the economic legacies of racialized enslavement, also explored three features of slavery that have persisted since its formal abolition: (1) the absence of a relationship between that for which enslaved people were responsible and that for which they were punished; (2) a legacy of “two races locked in daily combat”; and (3) the treatment of black people as if they had no kin. According to Wright, even though nonblack descendants of slaves have arguably become free of the histories of their ancestors, such freedom remains elusive for African-descended communities. For most black people, “postslavery” has been a protracted racialized neoslavery. Widespread public embarrassment regarding slavery’s continued grammar has not been matched by commitment to its actual eradication. Consequently, even though Wright himself was able to steal himself away from US unfreedom, this fell short of his normative ideal of freedom.

Notes toward a Political Economy of Life and Death

Building on his previous analysis of the short stories in Wright’s anthology Uncle Tom’s Children, Abdul R. JanMohamed reflects on Wright’s gradual discovery of a close relationship between social death, actual death, and symbolic death. Because “primitive accumulation” refers not only to the material dispossession of the slave’s world but also to the appropriation of subjectivity, questions arise about whether an ex-slave can repossess psycho-political and sociopolitical components of subjectivity in Jim Crow societies that operate predominantly through the inculcation of widespread fear. Against the poststructuralist doxa about the decentered subject and the need to abolish “identity politics,” JanMohamed insists that individual subjects are driven to center themselves and to make their lives as coherent as possible. This is especially true in contexts of colonization, racialization, genderization, and enslavement that rely on disrupting the attempts by oppressed people to control their daily practices.

Many Dark Mirrors in Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices

This chapter by Perry S. Moskowitz examines the politics of Richard Wright’s textual practices in 12 Million Black Voices. In particular, it focuses on how Wright responds to being tasked with representing a transhistorical and universal account of the black experience. Rather than use his position as a prominent black intellectual to authorize this account, Wright employs literary montage to invite other textual agents to contest the singularity and credibility of his narrative. Through montage, Wright exposes his reader to the white supremacist logics of representation that entrust him to serve as a delegate for a collective black narrative. Moreover, Wright uses montage to propose a counterpolitics of representation—one that values decentralized representative authority in order to stress the inconsistency and multiplicity that accompanies political representation.

Psychology and Black Liberation in Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954)

In his travel writings on the Gold Coast/Ghana, Richard Wright drew on two psychological theories—Freudian psychoanalysis and the implicit psychology of African American literary tradition—to describe the relationships among colonialism, state power, racial identity and psychic life. Dorothy Stringer’s essay notes that while Wright’s rationalism and belief in modern progress often prompted him to question, and even condemn, the local cultures and political systems he encountered, his emphasis on actual and historical trauma (above all the traumas of the slave trade) also allowed him to understand daily life, quotidian relationships and minor economic transactions as political in nature, as continuous with a broad history of black resistance, and as tools for projecting a different future for black people.

Masculinity, Misogyny, and the Limits of Racial Community

This excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic offers a different perspective on Wright’s thinking regarding relations between black men and women, and about the ability of black communities more generally to offer liberating narratives of racial authenticity. Gilroy suggests that one legacy of the racially coercive Jim Crow South was domestic authoritarianism, as well as violence in public and intimate relations. Wright recognized this and openly addressed it in his art. According to Gilroy, Wright manifested a protofeminism in his early work and later seemed to recognize the place of black women in racial struggle. At the same time, Wright thought that the stresses of modern black life meant that racial identity, on its own, could not guarantee racial solidarity or even fraternal association. This was evident in Wright’s portraits of black homophobia, misogyny and other antisocial attributes that could not be ascribed solely to racism. This frankness, Gilroy worries, is misunderstood by those who would read him in a narrowly US black context rather than alongside his diverse interlocutors on both sides of the Atlantic.