Richard Wright‟s Trans-Nationalism: New Dimensions to Modern American Expatriate Literature A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Mamoun F. I. Alzoubi Kent State University August 2016 ©Copyright All Rights Reserved Dissertation written by Mamoun F. I. Alzoubi B.A., Yarmouk University, Jordan, 1999 M.A., Yarmouk University, Jordan, 2003 APPROVED BY Prof. Yoshinobu Hakutani, Co-chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Dr. Babacar M‟Baye, Co-chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Prof. Robert Trogdon, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Dr. Timothy Scarnecchia, Dr. Elizabeth Smith, ACCEPTED BY Prof. Robert Trogdon, Chair, Department of English Prof. James L. Blank, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii Table of Contents Table of Contents --------------------------------------------------------------------------- iii Dedication------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ iv Acknowledgments--------------------------------------------------------------------------- v List of Abbreviations------------------------------------------------------------------------ vi Abstract---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vii Introduction ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 I. Preamble ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 II. Richard Wright: A Transnational Approach ------------------------------------------- 3 III. Need and Importance of the Study ------------------------------------------- 16 VI. Methodology/Theoretical approach ------------------------------------------- 28 V. Dissertation Outline --------------------------------------------------------------- 31 Chapter One Richard Wright‟s Black Power: the Writer as a World Citizen 33 I. Wright‟s Harbingers of Transnational Thought --------------------------------- 33 II. Black Power: The Promised Land Revisited ----------------------------------- 58 Chapter Two Constructing Community: Overarching Global View and Philanthropic Appeal in Wright‟s The Color Curtain --------------- 97 I. Wright‟s Transnational Journey from Africa to Asia -------------------------- 99 II. The Bandung Conference and the Third World ------------------------------- 106 III. The Color Curtain and Wright‟s Theory of Constructing Transnationalism 145 Chapter Three Reviving the Spanish Dream for Freedom: Civilizations Meeting in the Ghetto of Enlightenment------------------------------------------ 165 I. Wright‟s Odyssey from America to Africa, Asia, and Europe ---------------- 167 iii II. Wright‟s Discourse on Spanish Culture, Society, Religion, and Politics 178 III. Pagan Spain and Wright‟s Transnational, Transracial, and Universal Worldview 213 Conclusion ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 241 Works Cited ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 251 iv Dedication To my father who has taught me the importance of hard work … and to my mother who encourages me to seek knowledge. v Acknowledgments It is a great pleasure to thank some of those who made this dissertation possible. I would first like to thank my supervisors, Prof. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Dr. Babacar M‟Baye for their patient guidance and encouragement throughout this process. They have provided a vibrant intellectual community that continues to sustain me amidst the inevitably heavy demands of the job. I am also grateful for the contributions of my committee members Prof. Robert Torgdon and Prof. Tomothy Scarnecchia. Similarly, many voices other than my own have contributed to this project‟s spirit and shape; the many scholars whose works I cite in the end collectively helped me design and situate my arguments in the following chapters. This dissertation would not have been possible without the love and support of my family. I would like to thank my parents for their unshakable confidence in me and my brothers and sisters for gently pushing me to the finish line. vi List of Abbreviations American Hunger AH Black Boy BB Black Power BP The Color Curtain CC Unfinished Quest UQ White Man, Listen! WML vii Abstract This dissertation focuses on Richard Wright‟s later non-fiction works Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain. It investigates the effects of Wright‟s travel writings on his worldview and his attitude towards people from different national, racial and cultural backgrounds. It deals with transnational connectedness and the novel subjectivities it engenders. It also attempts to comprehend how the circumstances of interconnectedness, versatility and mobility engendered by globalization influence people‟s worldviews and their belonging to a community, concentrating on the transnational aspect as its case. While analyzing these issues, this study attempts to further our understanding of transnationalism and transnational phenomena in Wright‟s trilogy which fundamentally inverts the emphasis of most essentialists critics by crossing racial and national boundaries. Moreover, this dissertation examines cross-currents of influence on Wright‟s worldview. Wright‟s works serve as a heritage for critics and thinkers in the United States and elsewhere in the World. Wright calls for a renewed focus on intercultural and transnational dialogue in modernist studies. In addition, this study explores how Third World subjects map and narrate their multiple and hybrid identities among and between various discrepant cultural spaces, borders, communities, places and identity narratives. Rather than promoting the claims of sameness, identity politics and the primacy of a single cultural space, Wright‟s non-fiction works suggest these subjects‟ tactical articulation of their identities between, across, and through a transnational matrix of permeable borders and provisional places in their search for an ethical language of coalition politics and transformation. viii Introduction I. Preamble I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces in Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as the central organizing symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point... Ships immediately focus attention to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs. Paul Gilroy (Black Atlantic 4) As an Intellectual and writer of the African Diaspora, Richard Wright pushed against the boundaries of discourse on modernity, racism and colonialism. Wright‟s writings responded to the restrictive climate of his generation by refusing to conform his cultural and intellectual commitments to the national interest of the competing Cold War camps. His refusal contributed to the effort of African diasporic peoples to rewrite themselves as the subjects of capitalist modernity. The perspective that gives form to his new position, Wright argued, could be associated with Marxism that “creates a picture which, when placed before the eyes of the writer, should unify his personality, organize his emotions, buttress him with a tense and obdurate will to change the world” (“Blueprint” 57). Underestimating the value of tradition to build a comprehensive worldview, Wright calls for writers to change and exceed such cultural collectivities and emphasizes a “new role is devolving upon the Negro writer”; this new role should not be “less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die” (“Blueprint” 56). This new role should not be “less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.” These values take the form of a “picture of the world,” a “vision” (“Blueprint” 56, 57). 1 This vision was in no way an inactive vision for Wright, but an energetic, dialectical way of thinking that allows to comprehend the connection between a single, oppressed life and the larger functions of a capitalist society. His first break from the Communist Party occurred early in 1937, even though he did not formally abandon the Party until 1942. This essay was a part of the break. Wright not only defied the pieties of “the so-called Harlem school of expression” (“Blueprint” 59), he also declined the literary targets of the Communist Party. The essay which provided as a literary manifesto for new challenge formalized Wright‟s resistance to the Party line in writing. Wright‟s revolt held on the independence of craft, the need for the author to be handled as an experienced professional rather than a propagandist, or someone for whom writing would be a straightforward pastime. Wright‟s expatriate experience started when he moved to Paris in 1946. He lived in Paris without giving up his U.S. citizenship, and he often traveled outside France. Despite the constant danger of having his passport revoked for his political positions and affiliations, he was neither silent about his views nor shy about his affinities for anti-colonial and transnational movements of the Third World and its diaspora. Two years prior to the Paris conference, Wright published Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1953), a travelogue about the Gold Coast (now Ghana) on the verge of independence, and in 1956 he published The Color Curtain, a report on the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. The Color Curtain shows how Wright searched for a perspective from which to describe the unprecedented historical force