Richard Wright SIGNS OF RACE Series Editors: Arthur L. Little, Jr. and Gary Taylor Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern Edited by Philip Beidler and Gary Taylor (January 2005) Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop By Gary Taylor (January 2005) English and Ethnicity Edited by Janina Brutt-Griffler and Catherine Evans Davies (December 2006) Women & Others: Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Empire Edited by Celia R. Daileader, Rhoda E. Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz (September 2007) The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture Edited by Tony Bolden (August 2008) Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance By Paul Outka (August 2008) Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance Edited by Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (January 2010) Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century Edited by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (July 2011) Richard Wright New Readings in the 21st Century Edited by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow RICHARD WRIGHT Copyright © Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11281-0 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-29477-0 ISBN 978-0-230-34023-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230340237 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richard Wright : new readings in the 21st century / edited by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow. p. cm. 1. Wright, Richard, 1908–1960—Criticism and interpretation. 2. African Americans in literature. I. Craven, Alice Mikal. II. Dow, William (William E.) PS3545.R815Z818 2011 8139.52—dc22 2011002903 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2011 To my father, W. C. Craven, and in memory of my mother, Louree M. Craven —Alice Mikal Craven To the memory of my mother, Ann Dow —William E. Dow Contents Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow Part I (Re)Placing Richard Wright 9 1 From New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair Modern and Postmodern Eden: Richard Wright 11 R. Baxter Miller 2 Wright among the “G- Men”: How the FBI Framed Paris Noir 27 William J. Maxwell 3 A Father’s Law, 1950s Masculinity, and Richard Wright’s Agony over Integration 39 Leonard Cassuto 4 Seeking Salvation in a Naturalistic Universe: Richard Wright’s Use of His Southern Religious Background in Black Boy (American Hunger) 55 Robert J. Butler Part II Taking Sides: Racism and Spatial Dimensions 69 5 “White People to Either Side”: Native Son and the Poetics of Space 71 Isabel Soto 6 Becoming Richard Wright: Space and the WPA 83 Thadious M. Davis viii Contents Part III Wright: Pulp and Media, Reality and Fiction 101 7 Savage Holiday: Documentary Noir and True Crime in 12 Million Black Voices 105 Paula Rabinowitz 8 Richard Wright’s A Father’s Law and Black Metropolis: Intellectual Growth and Literary Vision 129 Joyce Ann Joyce 9 A Queer Finale: Sympathy and Privacy in Wright’s A Father’s Law 147 John C. Charles Part IV Wright: New Comparative Frameworks, Transnational Boundaries 167 10 Changing Texts: Censorship, “Reality,” and Fiction in Native Son 171 Claudine Raynaud 11 “The Astonishing Humanity”: Domestic Discourses in the Friendship and Fiction of Richard Wright and Carson McCullers 193 Julieann Veronica Ulin 12 When Wright Bid McKay Break Bread: Tracing Black Transnational Genealogy 215 Gary Holcomb 13 The Political Art of Wright’s “Fire and Cloud” 235 Robert Shulman 14 Richard Wright and the CircumCaribbean 249 John Lowe Afterword 267 Volume Bibliography 273 Contributors 279 Index 285 Series Editors’ Preface The first thing you see when you enter the permanent exhibits at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is a pair of drinking fountains. Over one hangs a sign that says “White.” Over the other hangs a sign that says “Colored.” To the extent that every social identity is to some degree local, the meanings of race in Birmingham, Alabama, necessarily differ, in some demographic and historical particulars, from the meanings of race in North Dakota and Northern Ireland, New York and New South Wales, Cape Town and Calcutta. But the same questions can be asked everywhere in the English-speaking world. How do people signal a racial identity? What does that racial identity signify? This series examines the complex relationships between race, eth- nicity, and culture in the English-speaking world from the early modern period (when the English language first began to move from its home island into the wider world) into the postcolonial present, when English has become the dominant language of an in- creasingly globalized culture. English is now the medium of a great variety of literatures, spoken and written by many ethnic groups. The racial and ethnic divisions between (and within) such groups are not only reflected in but also shaped by the language we share and contest. Indeed, such conflicts in part determine what counts as “litera- ture” or “culture.” Every volume in the series approaches race from a transracial, in- terdisciplinary, and intercultural perspective. Each volume focuses on one aspect of the cross-cultural performance of race, exploring the ways in which “race” remains stubbornly local, personal, and present. x Series Editors’ Preface We no longer hang racial signs over drinking fountains. But the fact that the signs of race have become less obvious does not mean that they have disappeared, or that we can or do ignore them. It is the purpose of this series to make us more conscious, and more critical, readers of the signs that have separated, and still separate, one group of human beings from another. GARY TAYLOR Acknowledgments Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century has expanded vastly beyond its roots in a centenary conference held in June 2008. Many scholars, artists, and critics have helped us while we worked on this book and as we discovered and rediscovered the vitality of Richard Wright’s work for our current century, and indeed, millen- nium. We would like to thank The American University of Paris for allowing us to host the Richard Wright Centennial, and to extend sincere thanks to all speakers who participated in this historic event. We are grateful for the generous assistance of Roberta Vellvé, Brenda Torney, Mark Rostollan, Olivier Serafinowicz, Ann Borel, John Gbajumo, Aline Mondavan, Deborah First-Quao, and Bernadette Ameye; the financial support of the U.S. Embassy in Paris; the sup- port of the American Church in Paris; and the continuing encour- agement and critical advice of Joyce Ann Joyce and Leonard Cassuto. Our deepest thanks go to Yoko Nakamura for her invaluable editorial work and her unwavering efficiency and patience. An earlier version of Robert Butler’s “Seeking Salvation in a Naturalistic Universe: Richard Wright’s Use of His Southern Religious Background in Black Boy (American Hunger)” appeared in Southern Quarterly 46.2 (Winter 2009): 46–60. Parts of John Lowe’s “Richard Wright and the CircumCaribbean” were first published in “Palette of Fire: The Aesthetics of Propaganda in Black Boy and In the Castle of My Skin,” in The Mississippi Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 553–80. An earlier version of Isabel Soto’s “ ‘White People to the Other Side’: Native Son and the Poetics of Space” was published in The Black Scholar 39.1–2 (Spring-Summer 2009): 23–26. A shorter version of Thadious Davis’s “Becoming Richard Wright: Space and the WPA” was published in The Black Scholar 39.1 (Spring-Summer 2009): 11–16. An earlier ver- sion of Leonard Cassuto’s essay was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education 54.46 (July 25, 2008): B12–13. ALICE MIKAL CRAVEN AND WILLIAM E. DOW Introduction Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow For years, Richard Wright has been known as the writer of Native Son and Black Boy. These powerful classics have helped shape the twentieth- century African American literary tradition, but the study of Wright’s oeuvre needs to go beyond these seminal works to encom- pass his other writings, especially the rich and varied works of his later years. Though it does not ignore his best-known works by any means, this collection is the first to focus on this later body of works. Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century offers fresh approaches to Wright’s work for new times. It traces and gives far-reaching analyses of his creative direction as he reached beyond the safe boundaries and successes of the early works, which largely define his legacy today. In postwar America, Richard Wright charted distinctive lines of black transnationalism while also writing about the struggles of blacks in the United States and about his own conflicted American identity. He wrote a first- person, subjective narrative of the people and the revo- lutionary movement of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) entitled Black Power (1954), while contemporaneously experimenting with African American fictional forms of melodrama and violent revolt in the The Outsider (1953) and Savage Holiday (1954), both set in the United States.