Richard Wright‟s Trans-: 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. : 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 : 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 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 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, 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 , Richard Wright pushed against the boundaries of discourse on modernity, 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 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. , 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 that the Bandung Conference represented. Wright shows broad-mindedness as he moved through

Africa, Europe and Asia.

2

As a central part of his transnational experiences, Paris afforded him the opportunity to mingle with French intellectuals as well as broaden his political perspectives; and he wrote as many books abroad as he did in his native America. Focusing on The Color Curtain, Black

Power and Pagan Spain, my dissertation will explore Wright‟s trans-national worldview and highlight his leadership in encouraging intercultural dialogue and advocating democracy in the non-fiction works that he produced during exile. Such writings are crucial because they reflect the connections between exile and transnationalism in Wright‟s intellectual life. George

Lamming argues, in The Pleasures of Exile, that “[t]he exile is a universal figure ... We are made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and our irrelevance of function in a society whose past we can‟t alter, and whose future is always beyond us ... To be an exile is to be alive”

(24). Identically, the confluence of transnationalism and exile made Wright go beyond his original focus on the plight of African ; in his cosmopolitan phase, he endorsed both the struggle of newly independent Ghanaians to give birth to a new , and the plight of beleaguered white Protestants in Franco‟s Spain.

II. Richard Wright: A Transnational Approach

Within the last decades, transnationalism has offered a significant exploration lens whereby to investigate the consequences of worldwide migration and the transforming of state boundaries across communities. The research has focused on delineating the genesis and processing of transnational social structures, combined with the distinctive macro-societal contexts through which these cross-border social structures have worked. Transnationalism is often employed both more narrowly to refer to migrants‟ resilient ties across and, more widely, to seize not only communities, but all sorts of interpersonal clusters, including transnationally productive

3 networks, groups, and organizations. The appearance of transnational techniques can be employed efficiently to analyze key concerns of social and political change and transformation.

The transnational turn in American studies, as outlined by Gayatri Spivak, spells the death of the traditional attitude towards comparative literature, as it now invites new readings of mainstream literature through the lens of world culture and literature. Spivak clarifies how this transdisciplinary has birthed a wealthy field of “world-becoming,” a “bringing-near” of the world—thoughts, concepts, idealisms, fallacies and histories feed into each other “resonate across discrepant global/local contexts so as to challenge First World/Third World modes of reading and transnational interconnection” (qtd. in Wilson and Connery 219). The present study attempts to increase Gayatri Spivak‟s notion of transnationalism, in its overturning of earlier ideas of comparative literature, to the field of Modern American Expatriate literature depicted by Richard

Wright‟s later non-fiction works.

Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism enter into a continuing dialogue. The primary strand of this critical conversation is dedicated to placing multiethnic America in a larger framework that examines interconnections with the world and searches for solutions beyond the narrow parameters of national borders. In 1916, Randolph S. Bourne, troubled by the hostile attitude of native-born Americans towards ethnic pockets in the United States, proposed an antidote in a new ideal of mutual tolerance, a transnational tapestry “with the other lands of many threads of all sizes and colors” (58). Critical scholarship concerning racial discrimination would help people look at it rationally, consider it with due concern, and in the process develop their values; in fact, this was the only opportunity that the world might have to move toward transnational unity. The severeness of lives provides a crucial lens that allows a temporal look at

4 transnational studies. In other words, it identifies the changes wrought by time to territorial boundaries and cultures of the world.

Transnational ideas and people were not difficult to identify in the early twentieth century

United States. As Daniel Rodgers has observed in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a

Progressive Age, “[i]f complicity in world historical forces marks all nations, it especially marks outpost nations, like the United States, which begin as other nations' imperial projects” (1).

Rodgers proceeds, “[f]rom the earliest European settlements in North America forward, the

Atlantic functioned for its newcomers less as a barrier than as a connective lifeline - a seaway for the movement of people, goods, ideas, and aspirations” (1). In this manner, twentieth century cross-border connections were scarcely novel, but part of an extended tradition seated mainly in .

Transnational networks of anti-imperial and anti-racist activists expanded because of this fertile soil. These networks were nurtured by the Progressive ethos that sought “to limit the social costs of aggressive, market capitalism” that “was of a part with movements of politics and ideas throughout the North Atlantic world” —and beyond— “that trade and capitalism had tied together” (Rodgers 3). They also were eliminated with the innovative spirit of a period that witnessed racialized and colonized people trying to throw off then oppressors throughout Asia and Africa, leading to a crystallizing cosmopolitan imaginary that would continue to bring together people across the first half of the new century and afterward.

This transnational perspective is best identified as “planetary humanism.” As Paul Gilroy argues it in Postcolonial Melancholia, planetary humanism signifies a “cosmopolitan from below and afar,” that is seated in “commitments to truth and open communication [that] are

5 anchored in and addressed to a consciousness of humankind that is defined on one side by a sense of the mutability of life and on the other by its singularity and continuity” (Gilroy

Melancholia 80). Performed “in the interest of peace and other cosmopolitan goals, which place war in the past as a way to solve human conflicts,” planetary humanist activism is developed

“explicitly as a response to the sufferings that raciology has wrought” (Gilroy Against Race 18).

Frantz Fanon proposed in his landmark anti-imperial and anti-racist text Black Skin, White

Masks the reorientation of humanism. Introducing the volume, Fanon revealed that he wrote this book “[f]oward a new humanism” that would engender “[u]nderstanding among men,” which in opposition to Western Enlightenment universal humanism included “[o]ur brothers”

(Fanon Black Skin 7). Fanon‟s text appeared from a belief in humanity and the firm contention that race prejudice can be taken apart by understanding and love. They also wrote a strong opposition to those who declined humanity to racialized and colonized people, and in favor of a general deconstruction of race in addition to a thorough evaluation of the process of racialization itself.

When we privilege the insights and experiences of racialized and colonized people who wrote and frequently spoke concerning the key values of Western Enlightenment humanism and how its attendant restrictions formed and restricted their lives, this history promptly came out. In the first half of the twentieth century, this history was evident especially around the eruption of global crises - the imperial accumulation that triggered I and the endeavor to stop another world war in its wake, the spark of World War II, and the explosion and aftermath of

World War II itself. These crises strongly uncovered cracks in the Western liberal project, underscoring the imperialism and racism that displayed the disadvantage of worldwide

6 humanism, which oppressed people had long acknowledged. As destructive as many of these crises were, racialized and colonized people understood that they offered beneficial chances to alter historical course and chart a new and better route for the century ahead. As a consequence, transnational networks of activists that had long fought against the brutalities of Western racism and imperialism mobilized in these crucial occasions intent on influencing change.

The mixture of tension and hope that colored Wright‟s perspective at the beginning of the twentieth century was common among those who made up this substantial network of activists stretching across the racialized and colonized areas of the world. Even though he witnessed the influence of Western colonialism, the breadth of Wright‟s perspective was extensive enough to incorporate such contradictions and in turn nurtured a deep appreciation for debate and dialogue.

This outlook has resulted from the life encounters of numerous of these activists that underscored both the promise and the cost of the Western Enlightenment project.

Richard Wright‟s transnationalism is a space where boundaries, national, cultural, and individual can be intersected and where new means of living are made available. Wright claims that diasporic subjects are involved in the resignification of their religious, and class status as part of continuing power battles that the individual confronts. In Paris, Wright forms several alliances, depending on the intersection of ethnicity in his attempt to handle his feeling of being an outsider. Wright processes the global into the local as a method to survive at the center of the empire new space. As Michel Fabre has pointed out in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, the year 1953 marked his “spiritual departure” from Paris and Europe (383). Despite the lures of

France, he determines to investigate other areas, where homophobia rules, searching for new experiences from which he could form a transnation, a community based neither on nationality

7 nor on race but on the same human basis. Although Wright represents himself as stateless, the horizonal space that he creates challenges the meaning of the nation-state and redefines home as a place outside the borders of the nation-state that deconstructs its geographical, ethnic and cultural confines.

Wright considers the function of literature in the transnation, particularly the human and transnational opportunities it provides to move between the structures of the state. In Pagan

Sapin, Wright studies home and nation within the dramatic change of cultural and legal boundaries that continues to impact the creative imagination of the Spaniards. Dictatorship and religion continue to shape the way Spaniards thinks and limits their potentials to open to the world around them and progress.

In his nonfiction and his documentary intervention, Wright focuses on the insufficient possibilities for people of color to absorb and reach the greatest beliefs of Western civilization.

He also detects the ambivalence in working with issues of modern life and the consequences of the United States‟s and Europe‟s part in slavery and colonialism. In his later non-fiction works,

Wright suggested an artistic advancement of his personal history onto the narrative voices he developed and onto the group encounters and conditions he described in his works of travel.

Wright‟s major works of nonfiction from the 1950s are still too little read and often misunderstood. His readers back then were even less prepared than we are today for the new varieties he was taking on in his nonfiction or for his bold approach to issues of colonialism and modernization at the peak of the Cold War. However, his later writing offers a powerful feeling of his continuity and improvement as an artist whose transnational vision was fortified by his years of self-exile in Paris and by his growing involvements in Africa, Asia and Europe.

8

Within the African American intellectual tradition, as Paul Gilroy comments in The Black

Atlantic, Wright is among those thinkers who “were prepared to renounce the easy claims of

African American exceptionalism in favor of a global, coalitional politics in which anti- imperialism and anti-racism might be seen to interact if not to fuse” (4). To realize the transforming nature of this paradigmatic manifestation from his early books through such later works as Black Power, The Color Curtain and Pagan Spain is to start to realize how, even before diaspora and cultural studies became fashionable, Wright was working to make us aware of the chances inherent in our hybrid identities in the modern world and informing us to the perils of giving up to absolutist or essentialist meanings of race, ethnicity and nation. He started to look at matters of American racism and Civil Rights in transnational contexts formed by the new nations surfacing from colonial rule. In the 1950s, Wright began to hypothesize about the shared history of suffering that linked the experience of slavery, Jim Crow and racism in African American life with the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the large communities of Africa, Asia and

Europe.

The modernist views he established in his later nonfiction reveal the influence of his Paris years, and his existentialist involvements. His extended meditations on the extreme international facts underlying the global relationship between the West and the rest of the world were certainly ahead of their time. He also observed how the problem of custom and superstition in Asia and

Africa had advanced the quality of life for colonized peoples. Even though the investigation for meaning and definition continues powerfully from the early writings into this ultimate phase, selected elements come forth with a fresh concentration and sharpness. For example, as he persevered to describe the function of power in the personal and political lives of ordinary people, Wright‟s interest in individual awareness in books such as Black Power, The Color

9

Curtain, and Pagan Spain was mediated by a progressive need to have interconnection and community. Though in the 1950s many reviewers and critics viewed his switching to travel writing as proof of his decline or weariness as a novelist. This study proposes that in these later writings Wright was grappling with unique meanings of community and individual empowerment that would allow a more encompassing humanity. More powerful than ever before, Wright's nonfiction from the 1950s examines the dismal record of the West in Africa and

Asia in terms of his understanding for Western democratic values.

As a former Communist reflecting on problems with international politics in the heart of the

Cold War, Wright tends to make this last-ditch effort to awaken the ethical feeling of the

Westerners about their responsibility to African and Asian nations:

If the Western man has irrevocably decided that . . . his mere presence in the

world is a blessing to the less fortunate, that he will make no meaningful

concessions to the sense of justice and freedom that he helped to instill in men's

hearts … then the last and strongest weapon of the West has been voluntarily

surrendered to the Communists … The Western world has one last opportunity in

Africa to determine if its ideals can be generously shared, if it dares to act upon its

deepest convictions. (BP xiii)

Wright is devoted to the utilization of Western views of social justice and democratic improvement to those areas of the world that had remained poor and undeveloped under colonialism. There appears to be little space in his worldview for reactionary nationalism and fundamentalism created by emotion, religion, or tradition. This essential response to nationalism ushers in the advent a transnational perspective of his works and his worldview.

10

Wright illustrates the relation between books/ literature and global issues. Wright told

William Gardner Smith: “I become deeply involved with certain problems. The way I attack them, and think them through, is by writing books” (Fabre, UQ 366). In writing Black Power,

The Color Curtain and Pagan Spain, Wright positions himself as an involved outsider, being an

American of African descent, as an African American shaped by his early encounters in the

South, yet even more, as an impartial intellectual committed to acknowledging basic freedoms and amenities for all, regardless of ideology and culture. As Gayatri Spivak puts it, “[e]veryone reads life and the world like a book … Without the reading of the world as a book, there is no prediction, no planning, no taxes, no laws, no welfare, no war” (“Reading the World” 671).

Given its link with literature, this study is an intervention that can help to reestablish the importance of reading Wright's later non-fiction works and disclose how they move through transnational currents of intellectual stimulation.

While Wright‟s non-traditional reactions to such contradictions may not appeal to some readers today, others will see his lifelong opposition to the devastating power of neat categories quite instructive. Many critics are susceptible to value his trying to alter our understanding of national and cultural boundaries and utilizing an interrogation of absolutist ideas of race, ethnicity, nation and culture. For readers of race, culture and literature, there is much to discover from the way Wright took serious hazards by exploring these challenges in global terms while still grounded in the particular political and cultural contexts of The Color Curtain, Black Power, and Pagan Spain. Like his better-known early works, these books assert that the idea of individual versus community is central to the Wright canon. In Wright‟s perspective, the community must exist primarily to confirm and develop the individual, and in most of his works he is centered on the damaging effects that succeed when that formula is interrupted by powerful

11 elements of race and economics, politics and religion. In these later works, he implemented a transnational worldview that fortified his literary career and distinguished him as an American expatriate writer.

Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani explain that transnationalism concentrates mainly on

“various flows and counter flows and the multi-striated connections they give rise to” (4): allegiance or identifications with class and sexuality among other things. These populations, in their dispersal, built “transnational social fields that cut across geographic, cultural and political borders” (12), producing “hybrid” space populated by “hybrid” identities, the explication of which begged critique through diverse lenses of interdisciplinarity. In the recent transnational turn, Wright put his texts in conversation with nations and cultures in a global context, bringing to the fore the need to get beyond the inherent restrictions of the nation-state, if simply to remain relevant in an ostensibly post-ethnic and postnational world.

Relevant to this topic, the nation continues to be a potent form of identification even for the transnational subject in postcolonial states. The nation continues to form one‟s subjectivity

(no matter how cosmopolitan one is) and signifies “an overriding identification of the individual with a culture that is protected by the state” (Duara 152). Nationalism, which Anthony Smith describes as “an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of , unity and identity of a human population,” is a ubiquitous force in the practical matters of everyday life; to give the simplest example, cosmopolitan movement between states is not possible without proper documentation and security procedures (2). In his later non-fiction works, Wright sometimes appears ambivalent about nationalism and transnational structures. Although he is a

12 robust advocate of transnationalism, Wright is pictured a transnational subject who cannot escape the grips of nationalism.

It could well be that Wright, together with , whose Black Skin, White Masks came out in 1952, brought the way toward displaying the political commitment of existentialism through literature. Through , existentialism became more obviously political, as confirmed in the careers and writings of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s. Being an artist, Wright was still working out of the same worldview, the same narrative power and intellectual agenda that had formed the early works by which he is best appreciated. Black Power, for example, allows Wright‟s prescient views on Africa to understand and challenge all those who are ready, like Fanon, to encounter the past, “with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 232). In revealing unfamiliar reality in Black Power, Wright the artist is certainly in command. Where a lesser writer would have left us with his or her uncertainties, Wright‟s dramatic account permits us not only to experience his bewilderment but also to share his expanding comprehension. As a considerable artist, Wright takes risks in leading us through unfamiliar . Often he blunders and stumbles, but continue to march on, he grasps the net-tie so that others may comply with.

If there is one idea that permeates all of Wright‟s observations and explanations in Black

Power, it is his confidence that no cultural or ideological variations can excuse or justify the amount of deprivation, the crushing and dehumanizing problems, the patterns of subjugation and parasitism, that he often inhibited in the Gold Coast. Such deficiency of human self-worth and versatility was just as unfavorable in West Africa as it was in the American South of his childhood and youth. His many, representations of stark poverty in Black Power should be

13 observed not as evidence for his condescension, as they have occasionally been viewed, but as a good indication of his empathy and commitment. He wished that some of the models of change and industrialization that had worked well in the West would work for Africans too, so that the masses might not preserve slave-like circumstances forever, so European colonizers would not suck their blood.

The aim of this study is to undertake an analysis of the transnational turn in Wright's literary career. Though the emphasis is mainly on non-fiction works, literature here is defined in its broadest sense of being a documentation of culture. Wright‟s Black Power, The Color Curtain and Pagan Spain, which are vehicles of chronicling and memorializing culture, political or social rituals, are susceptible to literary analysis and share with literature certain common affinities and particular concerns. Ethnic Studies as a field has sometimes stayed suspicious of transnational approaches that risk universalizing ethnicity and obscuring the particularism of the many different types of ethnic connections covered by Ethnic Studies. The study deals with an inquisitive vacuum of work on how transnationalism affects Wright‟s worldview and seeks to overpower the inherent U.S.-centric aspects of much scholarship in evaluating Wright‟s works.

This study will explore new topics and questions to draw attention to the variety of ways transnationalism mobilizes Wright's vision in his later non-fiction works and will rethink race and ethnicity across national boundaries via articulation, a unity in difference. Such efforts have the ability to see Ethnic Studies not only as serving individual communities, but also as reimagining the world. The transnational turn is used to counteract ghettoization. A ghetto of any kind, even a narrowly constrained world of privilege, like the “golden ghetto” Rowley describes

Wright as inhabiting in Paris, could not produce good literature if it could only be understood by

14 members of that clique (Life and Times 344). Transnationalism implies equality and accessibility: it is the opposite of elitism or segregation. Good literature has to rise out of the ghetto and speak to a larger community.

This study also suggests that Black Power, The Color Curtain and Pagan Spain are among the wealthiest texts in the tradition of travel literature. In Black Power, The Color Curtain, and

Pagan Spain, Wright encourages his readers to take part in his heuristic projects, establishing the potential of gaining knowledge from travel in unfamiliar places. As Jack Moore reminds us,

Wright‟s motives for journeying to Africa, as indicated in Black Power, are “public and private, political and psychological, personal and symbolic” (167).

In October 1950, in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, Wright had revealed the demand for “the peoples of the world [to] become aware of their common identity and interests . . . not only in opposing oppression but also in fighting for human progress” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic 148).

Wright‟s view of the potential purpose of the West in the enhancement of emergent Asian and

African countries is clearly in flux during the 1950s. In The Color Curtain, less than two years after his advice to Nkrumah against having faith in Western powers, Wright thinks in support of a purposeful Western engagement with a white American delegate to the Bandung conference who declares “[w]e will help, but we won‟t interfere” (CC 211). In his speech to the Congress of

African Writers and Artists backed by Presence Africaine in September 1956, he went even further: “I do say „Bravo‟ to the consequences of western plundering, a plundering that created the conditions for the possible rise of rational societies for the greater majority of mankind” (qtd. in Popeau 202).

15

In Black Power, as often in The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain, Wright turns his frustrations with African individuals or conditions into occasions that light the restrictions and possibilities of human communication. Wright describes his development of narratives as social interaction. Wright states that he wrote his works “[b]y going from spot to spot, talking to this person and that one, I had to gather this reality as it seeped into me from the personalities of others . . . Conrad wrote all of his novels in that roundabout way. It involves going back to some extent over ground already covered, but each going back reveals more and more of the things described” (Virginia Smith 202-203).

III. Need and Importance of the Study

Offering the lie to Harold Bloom‟s absurd declaration that Wright was a retarded literary son of

Theodore Dreiser who “could not always rise even to Dreiser‟s customarily bad level of writing”

(1), my project argues that his later non-fiction describes in some ways the rational objectives that created his artistic and social agenda all through his career. The body of literature that deals with Wright‟s non-fiction works is insufficient and does not do justice to an American expatriate thinker who was immensely involved in the issues of global humanism and social and political reform. In a long chapter, Gilroy considers Richard Wright as the center of Afro-modernism.

Gilroy concludes with a challenging pronouncement when he writes: “Analysis of Wright‟s legacy has been impoverished as a result of his being over-identified with the same narrow definitions of radicalized cultural expression that he struggled to overturn. The part of his work which resists assimilation to the great ethnocentric canon of African American literature has been left unread” (Black Atlantic 261). Gilroy also criticizes those who assumed that “everything that happened to him after he left America is worthless for the schemes of black liberation”

(186). However, Gilroy does not really consider any of the non-fiction works that Wright wrote

16 in Europe. Such writings should not be ignored since they help to situate Wright as one of the most prominent exponents of the transnational South. By missing this part of Wright‟s travel writing, Gilroy ignores a very important stage in Wright‟s attitude towards global and racial issues.

However, in another problematic study of African American writers‟ expatriate experiences, Michel Fabre‟s From Harlem to Paris gives a social and biographical account of

African American writers in exile such as and Richard Wright. Although this book is considered a ground-breaking contribution to social and literary history, it makes an unequal comparison in favor of Baldwin. For Fabre, Baldwin “wrote the most discerning pages on exile and the search for cultural roots in Europe ever recorded by any American, black or white” ( Harlem 5). Fabre, here, ignores the human and transnational aspects that characterized

Wright‟s writing career in exile. Although he died in France, Baldwin‟s expatriation does not seem to influence his worldview. Baldwin spoke for most American writers when he stated that

“one can never be an expatriate, really. One cannot possibly leave where he came from. You always carry home with you” (Fabre, Harlem 210). Despite his outspokenness and the importance he accorded to autonomy as a writer, Wright was not at all untethered from the

United States in his Third World travel writing. He was the kind of African American abroad whom Baldwin described as an ex-communist representative of Western ideas of progress and modernization who nevertheless denounced U.S. racism. While Baldwin‟s expatriate experience cannot be underestimated, his expatriation aimed at distancing him from the prejudice against the

Black and homosexuals in US (Gounardoo 158). Unlike Baldwin‟s, Wright‟s expatriation was intended to allow him to investigate new cultural and political spheres. Expatriation was an

17 experience that showed Wright‟s role as a reformist who tried to bridge the gaps among nations and cultures towards a peaceful progressive future.

Other controversial studies of Wright‟s expatriate writings are found in selected studies about Pagan Spain, Black Power, and The Color Curtain. John Lowe‟s article “The transnational

Vision of Richard Wright Pagan Spain” represents Wright as an “observer” and a “recorder” viewing “foreign cultures through the lens of his racial experiences in Mississippi”(95). Lowe ignores the active role of Wright as a mature critical thinker who looked for faults in a world that he tried to change and reform. Wright was more than a passive observer, since he aspired to spread a message of peace and call for human unity.

In addition, Lowe makes a controversial claim that Black Power “deeply conflicted Wright” and “had paradoxically made him feel profoundly American” (79). Lowe cited previous possible titles for Black Power such as “Stranger in Africa” and “What is Africa to Me?”(79). While it might be true that these titles instigate a sense of identity conflict, it can also be argued that

Wright called his book Black Power as a means to implicitly question Afro-centrism. His letter to , published in Black Power, emphasizes his anti-colonialism and his resistance to the hegemony of Western Imperialism. Yet Wright was not confined to this anti- colonialism and resistance to Western hegemony, since his mission as a writer was to create a new life by intensifying sensibilities and to work towards world understanding by improving living conditions. Wright moved beyond the boundaries of race and regionalism, a subject that my project will study in details showing Wright‟s global and human perspectives.

In “Did Richard Wright Get it Wrong?: A Spanish Look at Pagan Spain,” Nancy Dixion contends that Wrigh lacked insider status and Spanish language skills that were needed to give

18

Pagan Spain depth. Dixion agrees with other critics like Gomez and Dennis Evans who see the book as excessively personal. Dixion writes: “Wright‟s subjectivity was … the cause of much of the Spanish, aversion to Pagan Spain” (166). Likewise, Dennis claims that all Wright‟s travel writings are “integral parts of the Wright autobiographical canon” (qtd. in Dixion 166). Wright‟s subjective influence on Pagan Spain led Spanish readers to express aversion towards the book, since they as they believed that he had misconceptions about Spanish culture and was critical of the oppressed Spaniards rather than of the country‟s oppressive regime during the 1950s.

However, neither Dixion nor Evans does justice to Wright‟s Pagan Spain. They lack insightful judgment of Wright‟s far-sighted work. Therefore, my study will affirm the value of Pagan

Spain beyond the superficial documentation of a personal journey. Pagan Spain is an astute representation of Wright‟s transnational canon in fighting for equality and freedom for humankind.

Wright‟s Black Power has also been the subject of some critical studies. In “ and Black Liberation in Richard Wright‟s Black Power,” Dorothy Stringer discusses Wright‟s travel narrative about the Gold Coast/Ghana, and particularly the politicized psychology it develops as an analytic tool. Paying close attention to the effects of colonial economic control on daily life, Stringer examines how Wright discusses such classically psychoanalytic concepts as the return of the repressed, the Oedipal conflict, and anal eroticism in terms of West African daily life, often considerably revising both Freudian concepts and his own notion of black identity in the process (106).

Sosteme Zangari dealt with Black Power as well. In “ Straightjacketed into the future:

Richard Wright and the ambiguities of Decolonization,” Zangari represents Black Power and The

Color Curtain as works in which Wright discusses the problems that faced the developing

19 countries after he visited the Gold Coast in 1953 and attended the Bandung conference.

Tribalism was the main problem that Zangari emphasized about the Gold coast in Black Power.

Zangari cited a conversation between Wright and a man from the Gold Coast that reveal strong tribal affiliation: “During a conversation with a young man, Wright brings up the question of nationality. The interlocutor declares himself a „Fanti‟, and only gives an enigmatic grin when asked if he does not perceive himself as a Gold Coast man” (Zangari 3). According to Zangari,

Wright clearly understands “the idea of national identification was too new to have sunk home in their minds so that they could give an automatic reply” (3). Tribal identification, thus, was still prevalent in a territory whose borders had been drawn by colonial powers with economic interests in mind, regardless of ethnic composition. Wright viewed the Gold Coast and The Third

World as emerging countries that had problems that hindered their progress and their transition towards independence.

Moving to The Color Curtain, one can see different interpretation of this book as criticism moves from subjectivity to racial affiliation. Eve Dunbar‟s “Black is a : Segregation and

American Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright‟s The Color Curtain” depicts Wright‟s struggle with American literary regionalism as a kind of literary segregation. Dunbar argues that

Wright was attempting to understand black Americans through his travels, while addressing racial segregation in the U.S (109). Similarly, Yoshinobu Hakutani emphasizes the subjective and personal perspective of The Color Curtain. In “The Color Curtain: Richard Wright‟s

Journey into Asia” (2001), Hakutani points out that “The Color Curtain is more about the mature

Richard Wright than about the Bandung conference” (72). Hakutani‟s analysis of The Color

Curtain emphasizes Wright‟s “mature” experience in dealing with a global event from a third viewpoint. While Hakutani emphasizes the development of Wright‟s character, he does not

20 elaborate on the influence of such a great event on the maturity of Wright. This study will elaborate on what Hakutani points out about Wright emphasizing the transnational dimension of this experience not only in The Color Curtain but also in Black Power and Pagan Spain.

The above reviewed studies show the influence of subjectivity and psychological pressure on Wright‟s travel writings. They show that Wright moved outside his homeland and immediate locations in search of himself; Wright‟s subjectivity and self-indulgence is clear from the critics‟ explanation of his travel writings. Complementing the above studies, my dissertation shows that

Wright should not be confined to regional issues since he was a humanist who was involved in global issues despite his interest in the local concerns of African-Americans.

My project is going to examine Wright from a different perspective from studies that show

American Expatriate writers as alienated thinkers who seek accommodation to their self. It will also be different from research that represents these writers as authors who were involved in

Afro-centric or “double-conscious” African-American identities. Instead of focusing on these issues, my dissertation stresses the key intellectual roles that Wright played by making sense of the times and the world in which he lived and, through that, contributing to meaningful action for progressive change. Discussing Wright‟s travel writings such as The Color Curtain, Black

Power, and Pagan Spain, this dissertation will show how expatriation broadened Wright‟s individual mind and urged him to move from narrow identity commitments to a broad and global identity of a human that included all minor, narrow identifications. Wright was among the first writers who moved from narrow commitments to a vast and transnational worldview. Thus my project will attempt to examine Wright‟s travel writing in more detail that will pay close attention to his broad view of identity and global racial and cultural issues. His dream to achieve

21 self-fulfillment enticed him to go beyond the border of narrow geography and reach broader contexts of geography and culture.

The fact that Richard Wright wrote his most important books before his self-imposed exile to Paris is generally undisputed. Uncle Tom's Children, Wright's first major indictment of racist

America, set the tone for the protest literature of subsequent generations. Native Son and Black

Boy, now considered American classics, established Wright not only as one of the most perceptive social critics of his times but the spiritual mentor of almost every major Afro-

American writer since the end of the Second World War. In his article “The Blacks,” which is part of Langston Hughes‟ An African Treasury: Articles Essays, Stories by Black Africans Peter

Abrahams recounts a meeting with Wright in Accra. Abrahams recalls that Wright was

“surprised that even educated Africans, racially conscious literate people had not heard of him and were skeptical of a grown man earning his living by writing” (45). However, this misjudgment of Wright‟s literary career did not stop him from producing important works especially in non-fiction genre. In order to understand Wright‟s achievements, it is important to study Wright‟s later works in order to gain a complete understanding of such a complex and fascinating writer. In an attempt to reach this goal, my project will focus on expatriation and identity in selected works of Richard Wright and will explore the ways in which exile enabled him to engage and challenge conventional, essentialist notions of American identity. The problem of American identity was especially complex for Wright. In the United States, Wright was on the margins of the common culture in which he belonged as an individual member of his specific ethnic and racial group. Leaving America enabled him to examine the constructed quality of American identity and, thereby, broaden the terms by which it was understood during his generation. He used other countries in order to assess his native land, addressing notions of

22 national and racial identity in the context of journeys home, and demonstrating how expatriation influenced his thinking on race and politics.

Moreover, Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain envision Wright‟s project of coming to terms with the paradoxes, divided loyalties and power relations that confront people of

African descent living in the West during the middle of the twentieth century. These U.S. ties complicated Wright's perspective on the political movements in what had recently been named the Third World. His speech at the Congress of Negro Writers and Artists dwelled on the terms that expressed his worldview in a critical period. In his speech, Wright said:

First of all, my position is a split one. I‟m black. I‟m a man of the West.

These hard facts condition, to some degree, my outlook. I see and

understand the West; but I also see and understand the non — or anti-Western

point of view. How is this possible? This double vision of mine stems from my

being a product of Western civilization and from my racial identity which is

organically born of my being a product of that civilization … Hence, though

Western, I'm inevitably critical of the West (“Tradition and Industrialization”

78-79).

Wright insisted on a non-essential, socially constructed concept of race long before such a concept was commonly accepted; his racial identity was a product of the United States and did not guarantee that he would stick to an essential African or African-American identities.

Wright‟s trips to the Gold Coast and the Bandung Conference had taught him that while he sympathized with the plight of the oppressed populations of Africa and Asia, there was no necessary connection between them; but his perspective could not be considered “Western” alone. “[M]y reactions and attitudes are those of the West,” he explained in his lecture, “I see

23 both worlds from another and third point of view” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 79). This vision is not merely an international version of “double consciousness,” that identifies the oppressed position of in the United States with that of colonized peoples in

Asia and Africa. Wright‟s description of this point of view does overlap with the idea of a force aligned with neither capitalism nor ; this is also one of the ways the Third World came to define itself. What makes Wright‟s “third point of view” different is his emphasis on perspective and vision. The “third point of view” is not just a force; it is a different kind of consciousness.

Wright‟s transnational vision was reinforced in The Color Curtain where he presents

Bandung as a bridge-building conference. It is the possible shape of these bridges that interests

Wright, even before he goes to the conference. The Color Curtain commences with Wright reading an announcement of the conference in an evening newspaper. He says: “A stream of realizations claimed my mind: these people were ex-colonial subjects, people whom the white

West called „colored‟ peoples … The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting” (CC 11). As important as who was meeting were the terms in which they were meeting: “This smacked of something new, something beyond Left and Right. Looked at in terms of history, these nations represented races and religions, vague but potent forces,” and most importantly, “the call for the meeting had not been sounded in terms of ideology” (CC 13, 14). Whereas Africa had seemed to demand a conventional racial solidarity from him, the possibilities for connecting to the event in Bandung were less proscribed.

Thus for Richard Wright, expatriation was an escape from social form. This escape from both literary and social forms gave him the freedom to explore alternatives in life and in artistic expression. As an expatriate, he was freer to question the apparently iron clad components of

24

American identity such as race and physical residence. Expatriation gave Richard Wright the opportunity to study racism in a global context. At the same time, expatriation functioned to regenerate his commitment to an American ideal: a democratic republic committed to nurturing individual achievement in life and in art.

Wright‟s expatriate experience showed a desire to demonstrate the richness and diversity of cultures in his adopted homeland France. His visceral experience with poverty made him align quite naturally with many writers in the Caribbean, and later, with the poor in Spain, Africa and the Third World in general. In an interview, Wright declared, “It is necessary that the black community of Latin America unite with that of North America. In this way, they will both come out ahead ... An association of American writers is needed ... the creative writers of the Latin

American world should stand shoulder to shoulder with the creative writers of the English speaking peoples in the fight for Liberty and Justice” (Kinnamon and Fabre, Conversations 33).

Wright‟s interest in Spain's former colonies in the New World eventually led him to explore the inner workings of the mother country.

Wright‟s exile career is of more significance than most commentators have previously acknowledged. It extends and makes explicit the themes and ideas that are distinct kernels in his

American works. Part of my argument is that Wright was motivated from the beginning by a pronounced feeling of injustice and oppression in the world as he knew it, whether it was in the backwoods of Mississippi, the ghetto streets of Chicago, or the countryside of Ghana and Spain.

Wright wanted an impact and he wanted to explain the world to himself and others. He did so at first in fiction, and he returned to fiction later in life at the end of his career as he did in writing

The Long Dream (1958). But he also used autobiography, travel books and straight-forward political essays as forms that helped clarify his understandings. In these nonfictional forms he

25 continued to use the techniques that made his fiction so powerful, for instance, his ear for dialogue, his attention to explosive detail, and a rigorous skepticism that equally rejected romanticizing Bigger Thomas in Native Son as it later rejected romanticizing Kwame Nkrumah in Black Power. Wright was always concerned with liberating the individual from oppression, and what changed in Wright from his early works to his later works is not so much quality or even theoretical analysis. Rather, it was his sense of the difficulty in his task and the scope of the arena he took to be his stage. This unique position of self-concept and attitude towards global issues fueled thoughts for Wright‟s imagination. He realized that if he took H. L. Mencken‟s advice to writers, to use “words as weapons” (BB 272), he could become an interpreter of the

American experience. That is, by projecting his own experience onto his native land, he could divulge and accentuate both the achievements and failures of the American people. Thus constant searching characterized Wright's own life. He not only fled his white oppressors‟ bat, but he also rejected the mental constraints that denied his intellectual freedom.

As this study will show Black Power, Pagan Spain, and The Color Curtain represented more than mere travel literature, though. Each book provided Wright the opportunity to purge the intellectual frustration that had plagued him since his move to Paris several years before. His audience was the West, his subject matter the entire globe. As he put it in “Blueprint for Negro

Writing,” Wright‟s perspective “draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history” (56). If there is a racial unity here, it is a temporary one which is aware of its origins but fated to disappear with ceaseless march of progress.

In addition, Wright‟s travels abroad had convinced him that the psychological effects of racism ran rampant in countries which had suffered under colonialism, a point he wanted to

26 make as well in the other volumes of his intended fiction trilogy, which he was preparing at the end of his life. When he went to Africa, Wright saw that although the imperialists had begun their slow departure, most Africans were still living in the colonial tradition, as if the Europeans were still ruling with an iron-fist. He discovered the same attitude among the Indonesians regarding the Dutch. But as he wrote in a letter to Paul Reynolds in 1956, “truth-telling today is both unpopular and suspect” (Webb 376). Whenever he attempted to reveal the facts, both about his native land and the entire West, he was usually branded an agitator or a hack journalist past his prime. My dissertation accounts for Wright‟s migration from the South to Paris, where he died a rootless man. What is interesting here is Wright‟s determined self-education and intellectual maturation. I argue that near the end of his life he realized a global, transnational perspective on human affairs. According to Wright, the only way for developing countries to secure their freedom was to break from “their stultifying traditions and customs and become industrialized” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 101). They must give “form, organization, meaning, and a sense of justification” (BP 347) to the lives of their people. Only then, through the militarization of society, could they “project the African immediately into the twentieth century” (BP 349). In his writings, Wright sees grounds for hope, but he is worried by Africa‟s failure to counter “tribal” culture‟s effacement of the individual. For Wright, revolution demands

“egos that are stout, hard, sharply defined; there is too much cloudiness in the African‟s mentality, a kind of sodden vague-ness that makes for lack of confidence” (BP 343). The source for this dismissive attitude of Wright was “tribalism” coupled with a “psychological legacy of imperialism” (BP 344). These quotes suggest that years of expatriation had nurtured Wright view of people from other nations and races. The research work on Black Power that he did in Africa

27 and his trip to the Bandung Conference of the Free Countries of the Third World eased him further toward a more participatory and global focused reading of cultures.

VI. Methodology/Theoretical approach

Recognizing the history of a global view of African American studies as established by early scholars in the United States, Michael Hanchard rightly cautions against African American studies practices that “betray global legacy” by succumbing to a “preoccupation with united

States African American perspectives on Africa and African descended peoples without first interrogating the “African American” as a settled category of racial and cultural identification”

(147). In line with Hanchard, African American literature should not be narrowed down to a certain group of people (African Americans) or be interpreted according to African American literary theory because the settlement of Africans in America is itself transnational. For this reason, my dissertation will adopt a transnational approach to Wright‟s Black Power, The Color

Curtain, and Pagan Spain. I will study these texts in broader social, cultural and political contexts to show Wright‟s initiative to build bridges among nations and cultures. To put it differently, my project will use a transnational theoretical framework by placing Western and nonwestern perspectives in conversation with each other and the work of scholars such as Hardt and Negri, Sartre, Paul Gilroy and Edward Said. Their post-colonial vision will be used to explain Wright‟s worldview and will endorse the hybridization of different Western and Eastern cultural forms and perspectives from center and periphery, past and present, as well as colonizer and colonized

Hardt and Negri claimed that the nation-state is being undone by a new borderless world.

And multiple, hybrid and heteroglossic cultural flows are not only omnipresent but have been

28 formalized and put into precise form by their theory of new, postmodern empire. For Hardt and

Negri, the “declining sovereignty of nation-states … is in fact one of the primary symptoms of the coming of Empire” (xii) and their main thesis is that this decline signals the end of imperialism. As they write, “The sovereignty of the nation-state was the cornerstone of the imperialism that European powers constructed throughout the modern era … In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers” (xii). Thus Hardt and Negri‟s general consensus is that not only the nation-state is dead (or on the verge of dying) but imperialism too is over.

Paul Gilroy‟s The Black Atlantic is one of the most influential texts addressing the idea of a modern black internationalism. His analysis of black Britons and of what he calls “modern black political culture “provided one of the first treatments of black internationalism in the Western hemisphere. Through his reading of ‟s Blake, a story about a black slave in the

United States who escapes to Cuba and there and plans a rebellion, Gilroy suggests an alternative vision of what he calls an “intercultural” and “transnational” process of categorization which

locates the black Atlantic world in a webbed network, between the local and the

global, challenges the coherence of all narrow nationalist perspectives and

points to the spurious invocation of ethnic particularity to enforce them and to

ensure the tidy flow of culture output into neat, symmetrical units. I should add

that this applies whether this impulse comes from the oppressor or the oppressed.

(29)

Authors of African descent write from a position in the history of the Western hemisphere that forces them, either directly or indirectly, to engage with the reality of displacement, of the functional illusion of origin or “Africa,” and the history of slavery in the Americas. As a result,

29 they form a tradition of literary resistance and of challenging the integrity of national boundaries.

Their writing engages this history as a form of interpretation.

Similarly, these transatlantic Africanist dialogues are examples of what Edward Said, in

Culture and Imperialism, has called “the liberating narratives” that challenge mainstream accounts of trans-nationalism by forcibly deforming both “imperialist culture and its nationalist antagonist [and] in the process of going beyond both toward liberation” (269). Also, Said undervalued the geographical factor in creating national entity. In Orientalism, Said criticized

“Orientalizing the Orient” (328). This eighteenth and nineteenth century process of inventing and reifying a geographical area and its people stressed that the fact of both an “Orient” and an

“Occident” were European inventions (1), and therefore, reference to either entity is a reference to farther than mundane geographical unit. Likewise, Richard Wright, as my dissertation will show, challenged cultural and national geographical division of the world. Wright was searching for a higher human commonality to unite the world and initiate trans-national and intercultural dialogue between people from different regions and races.

My conviction is that the approach that I am adopting, especially in an era of increased globalization and transnational transaction, will meaningfully contribute to the intellectual currents of our time in a way that highlights the prominent role of transnational worldview and at the same time does not minimize the contribution of other expatriate American writers. As my epigraph suggests, this project will engage the larger traffic of ships in motion across spaces in

Europe, the Americas and Africa; the histories of those motions and the iconic symbols that the traffic has spawned on both sides of the Atlantic; and how these symbols/histories and the conversations around them may be reinterpreted in the twin spaces of contemporary trans-nation and the transnational world experience. Wright describes his endeavor to develop his personality:

30

“I loaded the empty part of the ship of my personality with fantasies of ambition to keep it from toppling over into the sea of senselessness” (AH 7). By means of analogy, my dissertation will attempt to study Wright‟s transnational trilogy Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan

Spain to highlight the wider scope and precious value of Wright‟s works as valuable contribution to American Expatriate literature.

V. Dissertation Outline

The dissertation will highlight Wright‟s transnational vision that goes beyond the limits of races, tribes and regions. The three chapters will discuss Wright‟s three non-fiction transnational trilogy: The Color Curtain, Black Power, and Pagan Spain, respectively. Each of these books stands as a unique political commentary as well as a part of a continuum of Wright‟s thought after he moved to Paris. The first chapter will deal with Black Power. Although some critics viewed Wright‟s visit to the Gold Coast as a return of a repressed African American intellectual to a place where he highlighted the shortcomings of a developing society, Black Power is more about Wright‟s search for universal humanism than about anything else. Wright saw in the Gold

Coast a hope for loyalty and unity that could forge a political movement that exceed the boundaries of tribalism, religion and nationalism. Wright was better positioned to understand the

Gold Coast‟s political movement represented by Nkrumah‟s movement two years later, at the

Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where he faced not a single nationalist movement but a meeting of independent national leaders looking for a vision they could share.

Therefore, the second chapter will discuss Wright‟s account of the Bandung conference in

The Color Curtain. This chapter will present Wright‟s vision of a rational basis of thought and feeling that might connect the Third World and the West, replacing the connective bonds of race

31 and religion as well as the systems of communism and capitalism. Wright postulates that colonial racism might be replaced by a different Western relationship based on secularism. This unity will enable Bandung nations to rise and play a central, human role.

Chapter three will focus on Wright‟s growing global perspective during his travel to

Southern Europe. Through an analysis of Pagan Spain, this chapter will reveal Wright‟s assail of

Franco and his Falange party to show how dictatorship exploited the Spanish. Also, a reference to Wright‟s attack on the Catholic hierarchy for supporting Franco‟s stance will highlight the

Spanish church‟s discriminatory strictures. It is important to note in Pagan Spain that Wright did not narrate subjective account of his visit to Spain. Rather, he was diagnosing illnesses in

Spanish society in order to spread awareness among the Spaniards and find cures to theses weaknesses. By and large, while Wright‟s Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain diverge by covering three countries in three different continents, they converge at seeing the state of all oppressed people in the same way. In these works, Wright attacks racism and dictatorship that breed on an international scale and fought against the world of forces that imperiled freedom, and progress. To put it differently, Wright reveals a passionate concern for all humanity.

32

Chapter One

Richard Wright’s Black Power: the Writer as a World Citizen

I. Wright’s Harbingers of Transnational Thought

This introduction is a preliminary investigation of the pervasiveness of fundamental concepts such as trans-nationalism, colonialism, as well as race, which appear to be disharmonious ideas.

Trans-nationalism implies that the people‟s subject would prevent the potential of exploiting, splitting humankind up or observing it together with race. That is, transnationalism disputes the narrow racial connections as racial identification‟s insistence upon natural essences arranging human race down into hierarchies could show up essentially to battle transnationalism‟s emphasis on human proper rights and freedom. In addition to equality, trans-nationalism, colonialism, and race seem to be fundamentally incompatible concepts. However, as we will see in the chapters to follow, they cohabited in relative harmony in the 20th century. This question of translating the minority voice for the mainstream reader is what is at issue in my examination of

Wright‟s Black Power. In many ways Wright can be read as a starting dialogue to construct a comprehensive conversation about race, humanism, transnationalism and antiracism.

A few expatriate American expatriate writers noticed Wright‟s thoughts as appealing to the worldwide standpoint, as opposed to his specific condition in history as an African American.

After reading Black Boy, Gertrude Stein wrote “[f]or the first time, an American negro writing

33

… about negroes writes not as a negro but as a man” (Rowley, Life and Times 323). In 1945,

Faulkner had written to Wright, “you said it well ... I think you will agree that the good lasting stuff comes out of one individual‟s imagination and sensitivity to and comprehension of the suffering of Everyman, Anyman, not out of the memory of his own grief‟ (Rowley, Life and

Times 325). The comments of Stein and Faulkner indicate Wright‟s transcendence of the dependence on nationalism and race. Wright was able to build awareness and comprehension of the typical man‟s struggles. Wright demonstrated transcendence involving nationalized and racial impact. He publishes as a human being sensitive to human issues and problems. One wonders, especially in the case of Stein and Faulkner, whose thoughts regarding race did not usually overlap with Wright‟s, the way to understand the prevalent investment in globalizing

Wright‟s narrative and his distinctive historical connection with growing up in Jim Crow

Mississippi, in what comes down to a type of fictional whitewashing. Hakutani clarifies that there are some misconceptions about Wright‟s books and confirms that they are “not simply an embodiment of a half-baked philosophy but ... a genuine product of the African American experience” (Racial Discourse 141). This experience helped Wright acquire a desire to generate his distinct account by speaking to vast human situations rather than towards the concrete and certain injustices of American racial prejudice.

Reading through his reception combined with his political preoccupations and literary development in France, it becomes clear that Wright‟s transnationalism is genuinely polyvalent.

While the topics of his works and his general intellectual trajectory acknowledged an ever- expanding definition of the human, which strove to advance beyond local, racial, social, and ethnic identities, Wright has been praised as a transnational author, a designation of great status, by French writers and scholars. His most important biographer Michel Fabre writes that

34

while enjoying his fiction, we must not forget that Richard Wright was

attempting more than entertainment or even political enlightenment.

Uncertainly at times, but more often quite consciously, he was grappling

with a definition of man. Although his solitary quest ended prematurely

and did not allow him to find one, his achievement as a writer and a

humanist makes him, in the Emersonian sense, a truly „representative man‟

of our time. (UQ 531)

The repetition of „man‟ and „human‟ throughout descriptions of Wright recalls Stein and

Faulkner‟s transitional views of the African American author‟s works, just as the word

“representative” echoes Foucault‟s definition of universal intellectual, as “exemplary” and “just- and-true-for-all” (Foucault 126). Merging the writer‟s mission with humanist, good, true deeds indicates some of the features of a transnational writer. The transnational vision is an important approach in a contemporary world shaped by transnational economic and social forces such as globalization, migration, nationalism and multiculturalism, for a vision that is unifying while allowing for difference with varying degrees of uncertainty.

In the “Why Write?” and “For Whom Does One Write?” in “What is Literature?,”

Sartre precedes his introduction with an assertion that freedom is situated at the core of the writer‟s task. Sartre argues that “whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he talks just of individual passions or whether he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man dealing with free men, has only one subject—freedom” (68). The question of freedom, as this chapter will explain, is a common concept between Wright and Africans when he first encountered them. Sartre asserts that artistic virtue and revolutionary politics cannot be

35 decoupled (69). Sartre here emphasizes that the role of an artist is no longer to preach. Rather, they need to stand up to protect and justify their position. The discussions of Wright‟s Black

Power in this chapter as well as The Color Curtain and Pagan Spain in the coming chapters are examples about the development that Wright achieved in his writing career as a representative of humanitarian values.

Also, a novel‟s quality relies on its ability to surpass the narrowly individual needs of its production. A ghetto of any kind, even a narrowly restricted world of freedom, just like the

“golden ghetto” Rowley describes Wright as inhabiting in Paris, could not produce effective literature if it could only be recognized by members of that clique (344). Transnationalism, in this way, suggests equality and easy access: it is the opposite of elitism or segregation.

In Sartre‟s viewpoint, good literature needs to rise out of the ghetto and speak out to a larger community. Why does Sartre relate so frequently to Wright in his argument on literary transnationalism? Sartre continuously has recourse in this essay to inquiries of anti-Semitism and the figure of the “American negro,” even as he thrives to determine the largest attainable target audience with whom a writer could speak: “At first sight, there doesn‟t seem to be any doubt: one writes for the universal reader, and we have seen... that the exigency of the writer is, as a rule, addressed to all men” (70). Sartre‟s famous and social constructivist view will be on display in his endeavors to disentangle the main problems of freedom from that of instances, be they tyranny, racialization or privilege. His transnationalism is one of the possibilities of communication, translation, from a separated, specific, historical place and time towards the broadest and most varied of publics, who are enlightening by their engagement in the writer‟s

36 work as readers. For Sartre, freedom, democracy and, transnationalism are intently linked. He states:

The writer is, par excellence, a mediator and his commitment is to

mediation... Perhaps he is a Jew, and a Czech, and of peasant family, but

he is a Jewish writer, a Czech writer, and of rural stock.. .there are

qualities which come to us solely by means of the judgment of others. In

the case of the writer, the case is more complex, for no one is obliged to

choose himself as a writer. Hence, freedom is at the origin. (77)

Wright is considered the exemplary figure for that literary transnationalism. Though he could write from his particular, historical location, he talks in terms of eternal realities, offered to all.

For Wright, who had been forged in the protest novel tradition, who relocated to France in order to speak his mind, and who contemplated moving away from France in order to continue doing the same, freedom of expression and the importance of dissent and critique were completely fundamental to his self-conception as a writer.

As soon as Sartre begins to examine Wright directly, the problems of racial self- identification and external racialization enforce themselves as an impediment to transnationalism

Sartre has been elucidating for us. As a black American, Sartre writes, Wright has his subject matter passed to him; he will write about Black issues to convert the culture of a segregated milieu for the mainstream. That writing by African American writers must be autobiographical or “racial” is a supposition that is worthy of to be challenged, as it racializes or ghettoizes literature by black writers, implying that it must be about “black issues,” and it supports the idea that blacks “have race” and whites instantly tend not to. Sartre immediately declines Wright‟s

37 connection to the “universal man,” because “the essential characteristic of the notion of the universal man is that he is not involved in any particular age...he is a pure and abstract affirmation of the inalienable rights of man” (78).

Sartre‟s formula is a brilliant and concise definition of transnationalism that describes the concept‟s persistence for freedom, abstraction and the effacement of historical background in the name of “eternal” values. Wright knows the black and white world intimately, but for whom does Wright write? Does Wright address the white racialists, Sartre asks, the “black peasants of the bayous who cannot read,” or the European nations currently colonizing Africa and Asia?

“Black Boy may fall into the hands of the most obstinate of negrophoebes and may open his eyes.

This basically means that every human task exceeds its real limits and extends itself step by step to the infinite” (79). Sartre holds that Black Boy targets the specific audience of educated

Northern black as well as liberal white Americans, rather than abstract universal readers. Yet

Sartre did not exclude the possibility of reaching out wider audience if everyone tries to get over the boundaries of race and culture. By making sharing knowledge as a human task, a minority literary work can reach broad audience. Just like Senghor who linked art to language is able to poise a more universal role for Africa and its cultural and artistic influence. Senghor also clarifies that “the accent must also be placed on the Word which is, at the same time, poetry and art, that is to say Creation” (M. Wright, Becoming Black 88). Senghor could upend the centrality of enlightenment principle to a specific civilization; it is an impulse that is shared among humankind. Africa can be established as original and processor of creativity.

Sartre allows, however, that via the concrete, minimal public the wider community may be gotten to. Wright does not rule out the potential of attaining transnational thought through the

38 concrete and particular events in his life. Dorothy Stringer stresses similar eye-opening experience in Wright‟s Black Power. She accentuates the conversation between Nkrumah and

Wright at the beginning of Black Power when Wright highlights that “I know from history and from my personal life what has happened to us—at least, I know some of it. I don‟t know Africa intimately. That‟s why I‟m here. I‟d like to understand all of this. I think my life has prepared me to do that” (BP 62 qtd. in Stringer 107). Wright‟s journey to the Gold Coast surpassed “history and contemporary politics” and provided him with awareness about his black identity as well as the people around him (Stringer 107). Wright journey to Ghana has more overarching implications that transformed his social and political view of Africa and the world around him.

This journey is a concrete experience that converges his concerns with those of the world that suffered slavery and marginalization.

Wright is an example of authorial transnationalism to Sartre because he tackles more than one audience, that is, the informed and also the liberal white readers, who live in diverse worlds. Wright‟s transnationalism can be a version of double consciousness: “Wright, a writer for a split public, has been able both to maintain and go beyond this split. He has made it the pretext for a work of art” (Sartre 80). For Sartre, Wright‟s virtuosity in accomplishing various publics and uniting all of them over their differences helps make his writing universal, i.e. canonical. Like a religious figure or the leader of a social movement, the writer goes beyond his community situation and impacts the entire world, by having an accompanying dose of compassion. According to Stringer, Wright‟s experiences among “black people” clear attitude towards racial oppression and ardent yearning to the advent of freedom; he is “one that need not respect borders between nations, or even distinctions between the past, the present, and the future” (Stringer 107). The value of the writer who can speak to several audiences at once is

39 underscored by his position in history as one who can stimulate revolutions in the name of abstract human urged by universality.

Sartre proceeds, as writer, Wright thought that he had shattered the ties which united him to his class of origin, as he spoke to his readers from above in relation to transnational human nature, it seemed to him that the appeal he made to them and the element he took in their misfortunes were determined by genuine kindness: “To write is to grant ... he frequently had in view universal man and the abstract rights of human nature ... his position was, in essence, critical” (Sartre 101-02). Again, Wright, as a protest writer critiquing the racial policies of the

U.S. government, is representational for Sartre, exemplifying the universal, transnational writer as a voice associated with dissent which can alter history. Wright moved from particular moments of oppression and discomfort, and tried to create out of these moments an eternal, ultimate vision through moving to beyond the borders of nations and color and culture. So, the movement is an important factor in converting the moments from particular to eternal global.

Sartre should have a good reason to Richard Wright as an exemplary writer in pursuit of transnationalism. In some ways, this chapter can be an endeavor to flesh out a solution to that essential question. An initial response could be that, as noted that “Dick came into my story as the great black writer on Paris” (Life of Absurdity 216). As the black author of his time, before Baldwin and Ellison, Wright was a transnational as he was alone, solitary, an individual rather than a participant of a most likely threatening collective or a follower of an ideology that might contest the social order. Himes, also, emphasized Wright‟s transnational status when he said that

[Wright] had become a member of the communist party; ... Subsequently he

40

resigned from the communist party and attacked it with the furious emotionalism

that can only be experienced by a former convert. As a consequence, he was also

hailed by the rightist press and literary circles in France as the great genius of his

race... In the United States he had been used to set the standard for the Negro

super intellectual; to establish the yardstick for measuring Negro mental

capacity. (Case of Rape 31-2)

Wright was recognized internationally. He was a black author that the American literary establishment had chosen to crown in the 1940s, and that this establishment only selected one black man at a time for public literary success. Wright had to mediate between black and white worlds because his was the only black style that was allowed to speak across the color line.

Further than his cultural reception as transnational, the motif of transnationalism permeates Wright‟s life and work. The flight to Paris is inspired by a desire to encounter an unraced, undifferentiated humanity more fully. The time just before Wright‟s emigration to

Paris, nonetheless, also uncover an expanding preoccupation with humanism with the intention to escape the black-white partition. Wright‟s literary agent Paul Reynolds contends that Wright‟s experience in Paris gave him profound personality and gave him “peace as human being living in

France, not been made incessantly aware that the pigmentation in [his] skin sets [him] apart from other men, you [Wright] have at the same time lost something as a writer” (qtd. in Rowley,

“Intellectual Exile” 306). Not even close to eliminating Wright from an important and pertinent

American framework, as some critics have asserted, the Paris phase presents an important extension of intellectual passions that commenced long prior to Wright boarded for Brazil. In order to adventure his humanity more entirely, Wright had to get away.

41

In addition to Paris experience, Wright‟s visit to Ghana in 1953 was a serious investigation and tangible development in his transnational perspective. While he was writing

Black Power, Wright moved from his position as a comfortably ensconced European bourgeois intellectual towards that of a citizen of the world, particularly, the Third World. In the 1950s,

Fabre writes, “Wright did not actually leave France, but 1953 seems to mark his spiritual departure from Paris and Europe” (UQ 383). His publishing trips to Spain and the Gold Coast now Ghana track a growing preoccupation with Africa and its diaspora. His fascination with

Spain was in part to investigate the combination of European and African sub cultures within that country.

As early as 1954, Wright regarded heading to French West Africa to compose a nonfiction research in the manner of Black Power, his ethnography/travelogue of Kwame Nkrumah‟s Gold

Coast. Wright also deemed Egypt, Madagascar and India as subjects for books on colonialism and independence, and it ought to be mentioned that each of these sites has carried the impact of

French colonialism (Fabre, UQ 407). The Algerian conflict was just starting up once Wright forged his friendly relationship with the African nationalists George and Dorothy Padmore and found out of the anticolonial Bandung conference in Indonesia. Bandung was just accessible to

Third World attendees, but Wright guaranteed approval as a reporter for Preuves, which posted his scathingly anticolonial article in translation as “Le Monde occidental a Bandung.” Wright‟s topics were “race, religion and color” (Fabre, UQ 420). With The Color Curtain, a report on the

Bandung convention and Black Power Wright steps into an outstanding intellectual stage in which his loyalties altered from metropolitan Paris to anticolonial freedom challenges. Both works questioned the Western existence in Asia and Africa but didn‟t question France‟s colonial empire precisely. Wright was worried of being deported, and so he declined to talk about

42

Algeria, though according to Rowley it disturbed him significantly (Rowley, Life and Times

473).

In the 1950s, Wright increasingly moved his allegiances from the Western world to the colonized. Wright‟s overview of the plane trip to Indonesia for the Bandung conference is particularly impressive:

„I heard an explosion of the French language; I turned my head and saw

red-fezzed North Africans from Morocco, , and Tunisia climbing

aboard: revolutionaries and nationalists from turbulent areas of French

rule‟ … In Karachi, they were joined by Sikhs with bushy black beards and

Oxford accents. In Calcutta, a group of Hindus in Western clothes

climbed on board. The face of colonialism was everywhere.

(qtd. in Rowley, Life and Times 462-3)

The issues that absorbed him included the connection between Africa, Asia and the West, the mindset of oppression, the particular legacies of European colonialism in African countries, the imperative of unity involving people in the , and the opportunity for heading past racial classifications on the way to a secular, transnational humanism. Rather than being

African, American, or both Wright appears to incline towards a being a world citizen.

Wright was a member of the Presence Africaine team, which included Aime Cesaire,

Alioune Diop, Leopold Senghor, Paul Hazoume and Rene Maran. In the initial issue, Director

Diop declares that Presence Africaine “is open to all men of good will (white, yellow and black) who are willing to help us define the African's creativity and to hasten his integration in the

43 modern world.” (qtd. in Neal 284). With the Presence Africaine team, Wright assisted to manage the American panel of the First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, which was held in 1956.

The coordinators saw the conference as a sort of second Bandung for black intellectuals from around the whole world. Wright during the time was reading Octave Mannoni‟s psychological study of the oppressed under colonialism, and “at the Congress, Wright prepared to point out the social and political implications of , and the mentality of Europeans, while his other session tracked the outcomes of white cultural supremacy on the psychology of both the native and the black American” (Fabre, UQ 434). The work of wright‟s later corpus continues to gain importance in evaluating colonialism and expanding racial and cultural dialogues.

During the conference, Wright and Senghor had a chance to exchange their viewpoints.

For his part, Senghor would likely demand the indelible traces of African traditions in African-

American life, declaring the similarities he observed between Black Boy and African literature

(Fabre, UQ 436). Wright sought to find out how to create a route towards a diasporic or transnational African identity away from race, such as the conference attempted to depict, in terms of culture rather than notions of shared biological essences.

According to Fabre, Wright‟s own speech closing the conference was a critical reevaluation of Negritude, where he questioned African religiosity as a barrier to political freedom. Like Senghor, he distanced himself from his own of the 1930s, stating that such an extreme position was no longer essential, motivated since he was by the legal triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. He also persistently steered the dialogue and his own interventions towards issues of culture and politics and far from reflections on the Negro soul

(Fabre, UQ 438). Wright‟s secular rationalism, his interpersonal constructivism and his rejection

44 to consider in a black essence, not to mention his critique of Negritude, set him against Senghor.

The Wright Papers‟ typescript list of inquiries that I described previously confirm to the vast distinctions between Wright and Senghor‟s ideas that appeared in the convention. Regardless of their distinctions, rather than retrench in opposing camps, Wright and Senghor harmoniously directed the final panel of the conference, a “dialogue between Africa and Europe,” which resolved a number of the ethnic issues Wright had raised earlier. In the conference, Wright asserted that he doubt the definition of African American and his connection with the African culture: “But I want to be free, and I question this culture not in its humane scope, but in relationship to the Western world as it meets the Western world” (Presence Africaine 8-10, 67 qtd. in Kiuchi and Hakutani 338). Generally, the Congress turned out to be the place in which

Wright‟s transnationalism and progressively anticolonial politics were most efficiently practiced.

Wright, Fabre writes, was read and highly regarded throughout Europe as an authority on race along with the relationship between the Third World and the West. Besides Senghor, the conference helped productive dialogues between Wright and Cesaire, who were going away from the Communist Party at the time and whose revolutionary talk structured African-

Americans as an internally colonized society, a formula Wright should have found stimulating and adequate to follow up on (Fabre, UQ 437). When Wright‟s White Man, Listen! was released in 1957, Thomas Diop and Leopold Sedar Senghor both praised its insight and braveness. In a letter housed in the Beinecke Library‟s Wright Papers, Senghor commended Wright as a fellow humanist: “You have said some salutary truths to whites and blacks, even if these are occasionally not pleasing to hear. We can accept these truths due to the fact we feel, throughout the book, a great spirit of human brotherhood” (Rowley, Life and Times 491-2). We can only

45 speculate what sorts of collaborations and texts might have ensued from all of these fortuitous exchanges if Wright had lived in 1960s.

From I947 until his death in I960, Wright‟s trips spanned the major continents of the world—Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa—and anywhere he moved he was profoundly amazed by the devastating negative effects of Western civilization on the growing non-white countries of the world. He was observing the deterioration of the colonial world and significantly

Wright changed his artistic focus from fiction to the personal essay as a mode of analyzing the forces which contested Western world control. The desire to know more about new lifestyles, cultures, and nations goes back to his Black Boy. He tried to satisfy this hunger for knowledge and a search for homeland as an expatriate writer. His emotional hunger urges him to visit

Africa. His frustration about his experience in America aggravates this need: “I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched, it seemed, except in violence” (BB 47). He viewed this culture with torment and bitterness, but he could not go against this hostile environment. His visit to the Gold Coast and Africa was a search for the emotional satisfaction as an African. Oftentimes this emotional state leads to loneliness and overwhelming grief. Richard desires attention from people: “ I was compelled to give my imagination over … an act which blocked the springs of thought and feeling in, creating a sense of distance between me and the world in which I live” (BB 172). Wright had strong desire to associate with people and the community where he lived; he could remember “no innocent intimacy, no games, no playing, none of the association that usually exists between young people living in the same house” (BB 173).

46

Also, his mission stated in Black Boy and carried out later on in his visits to Europe, Africa and Asia was a vigorous search to define and achieve critical values in human life. These values related living a human life characterized with freedom, equality and justice; his search was for practical examples that could not find in his homeland: “my life was falling into pieces and I was acutely aware of it. I was poised for flight, but I was waiting for some event, some word, some act, some circumstances to furnish the impetus” (BB 173). Wright, as Hakutani observes, is a representative of the voiceless black youths of the South and he is objective in his observations; he is discussing social problems and tries to find solutions for them (“Creation of the Self” 71). It was in Paris, the Gold Coast, Spain and Indonesia where he got to explore these concepts and problems, practice them in reality and attempt to better understand them.

In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy believes that “the political language of identity levels out distinctions between chosen connections and given particularities: between the person you choose to be and the things that determine your individuality by being thrust upon you” (106). In

Against Race, and even more so in Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy “inquires into the components of a cosmopolitan response to the continuing dangers of race-thinking” (Against

Race 8). Race is, for him, eventually an idea that has supported its purpose in the 20th century and must now be left behind in the embrace of a trans-racial cosmopolitan future: “Multicultural ethics and politics,” he suggests, “could be premised upon an agonistic, planetary humanism”

(Gilroy, Postcolonial 4). Similarly, Wright was involved in a vigorous search to develop an understanding of human relationships and to translate this understanding into connections that reach out beyond the limits of races, cultures and nations.

47

While transnationalism indicates mainly the material fact of transcending national boundaries, has always some ethical or moral assumption to it. Wright, while sharing many passions and targets with Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Léopold Senghor and other Pan-Africanists, did not want to stop at a community of the transnational African diaspora. As an alternative, Wright wished for a process of life that would value “the sacredness that I feel resides in human personality” (qtd. in Fabre, World of Wright 189). This is why he bonded with Sartre and other French intellectuals, with whom he shared a Marxist and internationalist point of view. When it served the right political cause he was willing to “cross the color line” in his choice of allegiance. While not personally exploited in the manner people of color were, these intellectuals sided with the oppressed and therefore shared a political perspective with Wright, in spite of their national and racial background. And such were the kind of political alliances he was ready for.

Wright‟s life, above all, implies another concept of transcendence that contributes to his transnationalism. The blended achievement and disappointment of Wright‟s transferring system of allegiances indicates that he lived out, in the ever-expanding horizon and sense of transnationalism that has a tendency to continue to be in process. That Wright never became popular in becoming an outstanding, transnational writer might, with an obvious misery of his last days, be recognized to back up the statements of those conservative critics who judged

Wright‟s work at the face value without firm grounding in his true cultural and racial perspectives.

The point that this method involved and incorporated a life-long struggle with American thoughts and ideals demonstrates how hard it is to go beyond one‟s historical background and the

48 ideological interpellations that come together with it, the greatest of motives. For Richard

Wright, this is the unavoidable problem of the in-process transnationalism. What matters most and the opportunity to privilege this is one terrific value of an understanding of ideals were

Wright‟s attempts to fulfill a transnational ideal. He carried on seeking, remained in the process, even after he had recognized through difficult encounter what a lonely task that might have been.

As he mentioned once to a young woman who asked him if his own concepts and beliefs could be suited to make people delighted, “My dear, I do not deal in happiness; I deal in meaning”

(Wright, “Why and Wherefore” 18). Wright accentuates that his work is not meant to entertain; he strives to convince people about his ideology as a writer focusing on serious transnational problems that is why he emphasizes the idea that he is a “rootless man” (Wright, “Why and

Wherefore” 17). He does not feel that his job as writer to praise a specific culture or race even if this position may cause people to desert and attack him. It is his feeling that he has principles to fight for what makes him firm, hoping that people will understand and go beyond their limitations.

This basic summary unveils the way he drops the ball on a more comprehensive assessment of a practical action in African communities. Dancing as a form of communication is emotional, sensual and deep characteristics that Wright should have viewed as ephemeral and never concrete. In contrast to Wright, psychologist Franz Fanon is able to identify dance as a healing and sophisticated exercise which conveys and exhausts feelings within presumably simple ethnicities. Fanon, in his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth, published nine years after Black Power, maintains that “any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance and possession”(Fanon, Wretched 57).

49

Wright expands his argument through analyzing of the African elite in an essential and debatable paper which he presented at the historic First International Conference of Negro writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in 1956. As he does in Black Power, Wright prefaces

“Tradition and Industrialization” with an attempt to make clear his own suppositions and ideological stance:

First of all, my position is a split one. I‟m black. I‟m a man of the West. These

hard facts are bound to condition, to some degree, my outlook. I see and

understand the West but I also see and understand the non- or anti- western point

of view. How is this possible? This double vision of mine stems from my being a

product of Western civilization and from my racial identity, long and deeply

conditioned, which is organically born of my being a product of that civilization.

Being a Negro living in a white Western Christian society, I‟ve never been

allowed to blend, in a natural and healthy manner, with the culture and

civilization of the West. This contradiction of being both Western and a man of

color creates a psychological distance, so to speak, between me and my

environment. (Wright, “Industrialization” 78-79)

Wright‟s argument here revolves around a distinction. He insists on a distinction between motives and consequences. While he roundly condemns the motives underlying European imperialism, he wholeheartedly praises the consequences of its domination of Africa and Asia, for, by undermining the basis of traditional life in these societies, Europe unwittingly created the conditions for a more rational basis of life.

50

As Hakutani argues, “ [Wright] thus leaves America behind him, brooding that a man's worth as a sexual being should be determined by any quality other than the color of his skin”

(Racial Discourse 260). Furthermore, In “Tradition and Industrialization,” Wright echoes one of the major themes of Black Power. The salvation of these societies, Wright asserts, rests on the shoulders of the elite, the Western-educated Asians and Africans, freed from the burden of the past, who were now prepared to struggle against Western domination. From his standpoint as a

Western, Wright commences a savage attack upon the traditional beliefs of millions of people in

Africa and Asia:

I‟m numbed and appalled when I know that millions of men in

Asia and Africa assign more reality to their dead fathers than to

the crying claims of their daily lives: poverty, political degradation,

illness, ignorance, etc. I shiver when I learn that the infant mortality rate,

say, in James Town (a slum section of Accra …) is fifty per cent in the first

year of life; and, further, I‟m speechless when I learn that this in human

condition is explained by the statement, „The children did not wish to stay.

Their ghost-mothers called them home.‟ (Wright, “Industrialization” 80)

Echoing his advice to Kwame Nkrumah, Wright preserves that there could be no alteration of cultural circumstances until the last vestiges of traditional beliefs have been swept away from men's minds. He deliberately doubts the shackles holding traditional communities with his own perspective as a Westerner, an outlook that rests basically on a secular perspective of lifestyle and a belief in the supremacy of the human identity:

51

All of those past historical forces which have, accidentally or intentionally, helped

to create the basis of freedom in human life, I extol, revere and count as my

fervent allies. Those conditions of life and of history which thwart, threaten and

degrade the values and assumptions I've listed, I reject and consider harmful,

something to be doggedly resisted (Wright, “Industrialization” 84).

Wright‟s split up point of view had another curve as he explains that the outdated customs should be evaluated and reconditioned. He is combining originality with modernity, producing venues for what should the life of Africans be if they desire to develop and flourish.

In “Tradition and Industrialization,” Wright addresses one of the leading topics of Black

Power. The salvation of these societies, Wright thinks, lies on the shoulders of the elite, the

Western-educated Asians and Africans, freed from the burden of the past, who were currently prepared to fight against Western control:

They stand poised, nervous, straining at the leash, ready to go, with no weight of

the dead past clouding their minds, no fears of foolish customs benumbing their

consciousness, eager to build industrial civilizations. What does this mean? It

means that the spirit of the Enlightenment, of the Reformation, which made

Europe great, now has a chance to be extended to all mankind! A part of the non-

West is now akin to a part of the West. The partial overcoming of the forces of

tradition and oppressive religions in Europe resulted, in a round-about manner, in

a partial overcoming of tradition and religion in decisive parts of Africa and Asia,

The unspoken assumption in this history has been: WHAT IS GOOD FOR

EUROPE IS GOOD FOR ALL MANKIND! (Wright, “Industrialization” 97-8)

52

Even though Wright did not compliment the Western imperialism straightaway, he still believes that it did a terrific favor for the Africans making them more logical and intellectual citizens.

Wright appears to be watchful about the Western imperialism because he does not want to consider conquering another country as something legitimate.

The recent past, of course, did not reduce Wright's desire that the Western-educated elite of Africa and Asia can mediate between the beliefs that connected them with and the imperatives of their communities. It is interesting that during the same conference, Frantz

Fanon, who in the early I950s had humbly and professionally authored a number of letters to

Richard Wright presented a paper on “Racism and Culture,” wherein he advanced most of the ideas which surfaced in his main and powerful work The Wretched of the Earth, for it is Fanon's concept of revolutionary violence-derived, at least partly, from his watchful researching of

Wright‟s main works (Ray 150) and the denunciation of Europe which has had a major impact on the sensibilities of the leaders of contemporary freedom challenges. In the context of the First

International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, Wright‟s gracefully mentioned opinions had little effect on the result of the meeting, which in its final resolutions required a social inventory of the black world and the rehabilitation of traditional ethnicities throughout the black world (Wright, “Closing Session”). Wright‟s ideas were obviously at noticeable difference from the predominant outlook of the Conference. Although Wright came forth as a representative for the Afro-American delegation and mediated effectively between the Africans and the Afro-

Americans, while his literary works were often quoted and reviewed in depth in a number of papers throughout the Conference, Wright‟s opinions did not concur with the spirit of the occasions. Wright was careful of what he was declaring as he did not want to go against the

53 stream. He played a pragmatic role in which defended Asia and Africa in the meantime he did not renounce his affiliation to the West.

Whether the West or the nationalists, the nationalist elite may get stuck in their miserable life forever. Even when nationalists come to power there is no guarantee that they will implement a democratic agenda. Wright does blame those African elite for the situation in

Africa, and blamed Nkrumah himself for the restriction on the press, which shows totalitarian of the media and restrictions on the freedom of thinking and speech. Again, Wright is saying that we have given ourselves to selfishness that we hurt not only those around us, but ourselves even more deeply. Leadership, at the Western or nationalist levels, is not carting wealth of Africa and leaving the people living in poverty and illusion. One must assume a blunting of imagination and a sense of endangered future of a nation and a continent that have a potential to be among developed countries. As a writer diagnosing problems and looking to solve them, Wright calls for the need for change. In this respect, Thomas Holt confirms that “if race is socially and historically constructed, then racism must be reconstructed as social regimes changes and histories unfold” (19). The representation of race can be mirrored through historical and cultural changes. The role of the writer lies in the reconstruction of the concept of race and should take into consideration that histories and cultures are not static, but rather they are flexible and their flexibility should be reflected on our understanding of race.

The new way to live seems to require a new serious beginning and a new environment for its fullest expression. This new perception of approaching conflict management summarizes

Wright‟s concept of transnational humanity is firmly established in Back Boy:

I want to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world

54

outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo

sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march,

to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep

alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human. (384)

From this statement we can see why Sartre would choose Wright as the exemplar of a writer whose task is to define the human. With the politically charged language of “bridge of words,”

“world outside,” “the inexpressibly human,” Richard Wright attempts to build bridges of dialogue among races, cultures and nations, which challenges the society that denies human status to all but a few of its members.

Wright portrayed the postcolonial situation in Africa like gambling. Ghana and other new nations were calling to embraced democracy that may offer the possibility of infinite corruption.

Leaders were promising the benefit of the electorate, but it takes a great deal of discipline, institutional building, and tradition to make democracy incorruptible. For this principle, Wright‟s blame of the West comes from as to be a democratic country you should have been taught democracy, but during colonialism the West does not spend any effort to change the people‟s lifestyle and liberate them from old traditions and values that hindered their development.

As a public spokesperson, he undervalued the revolutionary prospective of the black world in the United States, while putting all his desires for the future in Africa and the Third

World. While Wright detected a kinship between himself and the elite of these nations, he was in fact a Westerner in mindset; and his beliefs and viewpoint usually conflicted with the ethnic and political imperatives of the battles he heartily backed. Wright‟s apparent contempt, in Black

55

Power, to folk cultures of the natives of Africa puts him in line with major current black thought, which regard the cultural resistance of African people as subordination to the backwardness to

African peoples and culture. Similarly, Gilroy has influential work in defining marginal cultural identities as he advocates anti-essentialism. As Gilroy states, “Whatever the racial constructionists may say, [black personality] is lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self. Though it is often felt to be natural and spontaneous, it remains the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, body significations, desires” (Black Atlantic

102). Just like Wright, Gilroy clarifies that black identity that is ever-changing and shifting backward and forwards, attempting to locate itself in the continually changing present of transnationalism and globalization.

As a literary representative, Richard Wright took over as embodiment of the questing figure he had so often portrayed in his fiction. This is consistent with his belief that words can be used as a weapon, an indication to his peaceful and rational way in solving problems. Wright virtually deserted fictional works in support of journalism, the essay, and the lecture platform in order to find some expansive frame for the viewpoints through which he attacked the West.

Freed from the demands and restrictions of fictional type, Wright became the character of his later works. Offering the fact of his personal historical experiences as the source of his inner sensations and most powerful thoughts about the future of man, he attempted to address the problem of identity in an international, transnational framework. Wright himself becomes a character that is going back and forth between real and fictional worlds separated by a fine line.

It is difficult to assess whether his political observations symbolize the limits of his creativity, his ultimate ideological resting place, or whether they depict a new phase in the development of

Wright‟s artistic and political knowledge.

56

II. Black Power: The Promised Land Revisited

Richard Wright‟s journey to Ghana was more than a visit to a country. It was an investigation in depth of his personality. His experience there showed the growth of his character. Wright starts his narration with description of the status quo of Ghana identifying himself with the natives of that country. In fact, he felt some genetic affiliation with African people. At the beginning this feeling sounded as though it is overpowering his American connections where he grew up and was educated. Between those two powers, there is a drive for resistance for the people whom he thought they are the offspring of his ancestors and for the

West that represents a dominant and occupying force.

Wright‟s dilemma stays throughout Black Power. But the struggle in his personality continues to reveal more character. His journey exposed him to valuable facts that neither the

West he blamed for the backwardness of Africa nor Africans can live without each other. His conclusions are self-illuminating, a glimpse that reveals paths among people and cultures.

Wright‟s initiative is expressed in the interdependence among the West and Africa. It also calls for working to building bridges among countries and cultures and creating common goals that served the interests of all parties. Therefore, Wright‟s experience in Ghana culminates in a growth in his in his character. He starts to look at things beyond the color line. His first-thought experience with African people did not guarantee his comfort and did not make him feel that he was at home. This is the reason why he was always coming up with higher overarching ways out.

Wright‟s Black Power recorded his encounter with African culture and politics eagerness to meet the freedom-loving folks. In his visit, he centered on the outcome colonialism and racial discrimination about the culture and politics of both the colonized and the colonizer. Wright

57 spotted the shadow associated with Bigger Thomas hiding behind the non-white nations which were beginning to struggle the right of Western civilization to dominion over their domestic lives and awareness. Yoshinobu Hakutani observes that “[a]lthough Wright wanted to belong to two cultures, American and African, as Black Power demonstrates, he was at times torn between the two worlds and remained an exile in Europe” (Racial Discourse 262). His own racial activities in the United States had prepared him—both emotionally and intellectually—to think of these challenges; and during his years abroad Wright emerged as a keen observer and critic of the increasing trend of nationalism that has been wide ranging Africa and Asia and damaging the emotional foundations of the Western world.

One year after he moved to Paris, Wright met George Padmore, who had had experiences with the Communist Party just like those of Wright and the two men immediately became close friends. It was in Padmore‟s London apartment that Wright first became familiar with most of the ideological forces which could form the battle for African freedom, and it was through his association with Padmore that Wright met some of the future leaders of African independence movements. During a similar time frame, Wright labored closely with Alioune Diop and other

African intellectuals to establish Presence Afracaine an important magazine that gather black writers and artists from all around the world. It, also, helped formulate a synthesis of different current of thoughts on African issues. Through his connection to Padmore, and from his cooperation and substantial interactions with Alioune Diop and other African intellectuals,

Wright developed a solid sense of affinity with those men who, like himself, existed in a minor connection with Western civilization. He discovered that the idea of alienation, so central to his most significant fiction, not only encompassed his encounters as an African American, but was transnational in capacity.

58

It was in Europe that Wright found out that the destiny of black America was inextricably linked to the fate of Africa and the Western world. Whereas Wright had in the past proposed

Afro-American life as a metaphor for the future of America, he now proposed that race interactions in the United States prefigured the future of the entire world:

The Negro is intrinsically a colonial subject, but one who lives

not in China, India, or Africa, but next door to his conquerors,

attending their schools, fighting their wars, and laboring in their

factories. The American Negro problem, therefore, is but a facet

of the global problem that splits the world in two. (Wright, “World View” 3)

It is a distinctive conflict with such extended assault in America between the Black and White, and this truth by itself endows the Black American problem with a vital value, for what takes place between Whites and Blacks in America foreshadows what will develop between the colored billions of and Africa and Asia and the industrial West. Indeed, the world's destiny can be symbolically prefigured today in the race interaction of America. Wright‟s preoccupation with his racial experience in America foreshadows his opinion of the world racial clash. Wright specifically tackled the issues of colonialism, culture and neo-colonialism. Although in his travels Wright covered both political and cultural issues of colonialism on the lives of Africans in a huge and clear-cut way, he often indulged in gross overview about the mores and habits of the people of these two continents.

There can be several reasons why Wright, while writing about Asians and Africans, was using more generalized than specific terms. He did not have a personal knowledge and experience of the ways of the people of these continents. Moreover, he viewed the facts of

59

Asians and Africans coming from a western perspective which failed to permit him to depersonalize himself and grasp the worldview of the Asian and the African. Besides the western prospect, Wright, as a Mississippi-born African American, was haunted during his life by the racial injustice he encountered in the United States.

During his journey to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he maintained with him this bitter racial experience like an unofficial passport and sought to look at the colonial circumstances in Asia and Africa from a racial standpoint. While this view assisted him identify the colonial standing of black people in the United States where racial discrimination was probably the most overt manifestation of colonialism, it undoubtedly constrained and diffused his statement of the colonial relations in Asia and Africa where racism was not an important matter in the everyday life of the subject people. Wright continued his mission in Black Boy and started to satisfy his hunger for freedom. The first thing that he noticed about Africa that its freedom was usurped either by the colonizers Westerner or the nationalists‟ elite while the people were still suffering from exploitation.

With that being said, he did not allow politics to steer his viewpoints regarding colonialism and exploitation. As a communist he had antagonized the capitalist world and as an ex- communist he had antagonized the communist world. For that reason, he was not required to expect or fear for anything. However, within his political writings Wright notices in depth the colonial connection, but does not attempt to put together any specific theory, nor does he examine imperialism and neocolonialism from any particular ideological or theoretical position.

Nevertheless, his investigation of this vital historical phenomenon, which had a tremendous impact on humankind, unveils an honest and consistent representative for the colonized. It is

60 suitable, thus, that one explore initially Wright‟s philosophy about colonialism as exposed in these works of nonfiction and examine afterwards his fictional works in the light of such values.

In his trip to Ghana, Wright acutely witnessed indelible markings of “centuries of foreign rule . . . deep in the personalities of the people, deeper than the people themselves had any idea of” (BP 104). He gives a stunning explanation of the influence of colonialism on the colonized in the African continent: “I walked past compounds filled with black life, naked, dirty, diseased, shy, friendly, curious” (BP 147). Evidently, Wright wants colonialism to perform wonders in the life of the subject people, as he is, rather naively, impressed by the fact that colonization could not provide any transformation in the life of the multitude. In Black Power he asks these questions:

Was it possible that Great Britain had had the power to rule here for

104 years? Three generations had passed and things were like this?

Obviously, no one had really tried to do anything. I felt that these

people could have created conditions much better than this if they had

been left completely alone. (147)

In view of the economic exploitation and arbitrary plundering of the colonies, such objectives from colonialism betray the rationale driving colonization. In this assertion Wright looks over the fact that in a colonial system the colonizer should not be expected to perform much for the colonized other than utilize them primarily as an item of economic exploitation.

Still, Wright, while he does not stress the economic element at work behind colonization, is aware of the economic bloodletting of Africa under colonial rule and reveals that the “only good

61 roads that existed in the colony ran from the mines and timber mills to the seaport” (BP 119). He also emphasizes that it is through economic affluence, not through a boasting about outdated civilization, that the previous colonies can increase. In Ghana, he experienced the distinction between “the might of the British,” their “rancid political insight,” and “secret atomic power in their hands,” on the one hand, and “the fragility of the African,” his “naïveté,” "naked plea,” and

“grappling with a new and different kind of god that could be propitiated only with raw materials: uranium, bauxite, gold, timber, and manganese,” on the other (BP 170).

It seems from his explanation in the works analyzed here that Wright takes the unintentional good outcomes of colonialism and denies not only the unfavorable aspects of it but also the ways which make the good implications possible. Supposedly, he claims that the West must have revolutionized Asia and Africa without colonizing these people. In his speech entitled

“Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” Wright emphasizes

Europe should have played an important role in empowering Africans and in helping them in their struggle for freedom:

My wholehearted admiration would have gone out to the spirit of a

Europe that had the imagination to have launched this mighty revolution

out of the generosity of its heart, out of a sense of lofty responsibility.

Europe could then stand proudly before all the world and say

“Look at what we accomplished! We remade man in our image!”

(qtd. in Kiuchi and Hakutani 339)

Wright‟s perception of Europe and its important role in developing Africa reveals his well- rounded personality and transnational perspective. He is more mature than Richard in Black Boy.

62

Wherever something stands something else should stand beside it. There is no one way to do anything. The world is a world of dualities and multiplicities. If there is a point of view there is a second point of view. This can be a central theme if one is moving among different worlds and cultures. This way of thinking may have to do with living in different countries and being exposed to different cultures. Wright lived in American as an African then visited different countries and continent such as Europe, Africa, and Asia. These experiences helped him to establish well-rounded personality.

One more aspect of Wright's observation of colonialism is the fact he tries to distinguish between the natural characteristics of Western and African cultures. In Black Power, he noticed:

The African places mystery between cause and effect and there is a

deep predilection toward omnipotence of thought, of spirit acting on spirit.

The more I listened to Africans describe their achievements in the realms

of the magical, the more I felt that it was how one related fact to fact that

constituted the real difference between the Western and non-Western mind.

(223-224)

He analogizes, in a blatantly simplistic and general manner, the collectivism of Africa to the individualism of the West and says that “[t]he system of native African communism saves him from want, for all he has to do is go to another relative and sponge on him. Individual initiative is not very popular in Africa. Why amass a lot of money? You will have to give it away anyhow”

(BP 245). In pursuit of the mindset of Africa, Wright, with his western dialectics of reasoning, wants to comprehend the transcendental bent of the African who “does not distinguish absolutely between good and evil. No matter how malignant he thought some of the „spirits‟ of the universe

63 were, never succumbed to feeling that the world as a whole was evil” (BP 334). Being under such hard conditions, Africans needed a savior to help them spread justice and freedom and surpass the submissive and passive prevailing in their community.

Wright admires this kind of balanced worldview of the Ghanaians but becomes concerned of its fallibility: “Maybe he has more than paid for that mistake, a mistake that was squarely on the side of the angels” (BP 334). His understanding of the African mind and philosophy apparently coalesces with the beliefs of Negritude, which also stresses the collective life-style, the totality and the faith based aspect of the African worldview. In Paris (1948), Wright became familiar with the black poets Diop, Cesaire and Senghor and was involved in the organization and formation of Presence Africaine. It is obvious, as a result, that he discussed some of the

Negritude beliefs (Walker 218). Although the newly-established journal was concerned with the propagation of works by writers that address the themes oppression and colonization, Wright‟s discussion of the Negritude was objective as he emphasized the role of black writers and artists as truth tellers “explicating the authenticity of the Black experience even when it was uncomfortable for white oppressors and the oppressed of color alike” (Julian 3). In the same manner, as an American man, Wright does not “believe a single word of all this”—the

Ghanaian's beliefs in the ancestral spirits and so forth—nor does he “endorse the killing of a single flea if that flea happened to believe it” (BP 336). Therefore, according to Wright, colonialism, although it turned the life of people, retaining such negative thoughts cannot be justified.

64

He admits, on the other hand, that the contact between such different attitudes to life was really a sad one. He demonstrates how African identity was compromised and African ability was ruined as a consequence of this kind of interaction:

The emotional and psychological factors involved in the mere

confrontation of the African by his white master is enough to reduce his

efficiency and intelligence immeasurably. Europeans will "never" be

able to command the same degree of skills, loyalty, devotion, and

intelligence of the Africans that the Africans can command of their

own people. Centuries of invasion, war, plunder, indirect methods of

exploitation have enthroned themselves in tradition, structuralized

themselves in institutions, and kept alive the sense of the conquered and

the conquerors. (BP 314)

Wright establishes himself with the West, but does not denounce his African origins. Evidently, he realizes himself at odds in Ghana and does not fully grasp a lot of the Ghanaian ways for living which he generalizes as the African methods, their faith in ancestral spirits and traditions.

Although the determinism of action in the Ghanaian tribes helped Wright come up with exceptional ideals, he clearly fails to judge the ways of the Ghanaians originating from a non- western perspective. Thus, he is unable to understand them; his blackness does not help him be aware of the value judgment of the African. Wright is fully aware of the difference between himself and a Ghanaian. Wright‟s inability to understand and judge the Ghanaians drove him to draw relations by similarity and proximity. His experience in the South was assistance for him to better appreciate this situation.

65

According to Wright, the European colonialists, who “in their hearts know they have long tried to murder Africa” (BP 348), were no different from the “Lords of the Land” in the countryside South and the “Bosses of the Buildings” in the urban slums of the North who had reprehended black Americans to a degree of just subsistence. For centuries, the Western forces, especially the British, had drove the Ghanaian people astray, and instead of modernizing or improving the standards of life in the Gold Coast, they had abused, plundered and ravaged the country so entirely that it had stagnated, locked into an abyss of agony and decay. In a letter at the conclusion of Black Power, Wright warns Nkrumah to “have no illusions regarding Western attitudes” toward Africa because “if until today Africa was static, it was because Europe deliberately wanted to keep her that way” (BP 343). Wright continues to assail the colonialists‟ motive:

They do not even treat the question of Africa's redemption seriously;

to them it is a source of amusement; and those few Europeans who

do manage to become serious about Africa are more often prompted by

psychological reasons than anything else. The greatest millstone about

the neck of Africa for the past three hundred years has been the

psychologically crippled white seeking his own perverse personal salvation.

(BP 343)

Wright encouraged a “militarization” of Ghanaian people that would “sweep out the tribal cobwebs and place the feet of the masses upon a basis of reality” (BP 346). Only by “giving form, organization, direction, meaning, and a sense of justification” to the people, could “Africa project immediately into the 20th century” (BP 348). That the practices of the Ghanaian natives

66 differed substantially from his own often inconvenienced Wright and, even though he looked down upon taking “refreshments” from the British, he still deemed himself strongly aligned to

European principles and belief. A few days into his trip a disillusioned Wright reports: “I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me” (BP 127). Wright deemed the color of skin a superficial means of connection; it does not help him to identify with the people in Ghana. He feels that the essence of his personality is more Western even though he is has black skin.

Undoubtedly, Wright was not optimistic: “The Western world does not even yet quite know how hard and inhuman its face looks to those who live outside of its confines” (BP xiii), he writes. One of Wright‟s aims was to present not only the West but the whole world that “face” in hopes that nations could obtain an understanding of such a complex situation. Unfortunately, as he expresses so solemnly nearby the end of the introduction, “it may well be too late” (BP xiii).

Wright is cautioning against the decay of the African culture if it is retained as it is. He is trying to reconcile the opposite views of the colonized and colonizer.

Wright‟s debatable perception of Africa is deep-seated. His important antagonism to

Afro-American traditions and his primary skepticism about race as a significant category around which one could arrange a critical sense of real identity; for Richard Wright, the search for an

African heritage had never been a key preoccupation. Consequently, as he traveled to West

Africa in 1953, although he attempted to keep a neutral stand, he maintained with him particular rational predispositions and an emotional position concerning the quality of life in Africa which, ironically, had been formed by his experience in the United States.

67

In Black Power, Wright exposes himself as an outsider, a cultural interloper who often is deficient in the insights or empathy necessary to pass through the African setting. He was constantly curious and puzzled by the common moments he often encountered in the Gold

Coasts. In a moment of reflection and self-revelation, Wright suggests that possibly his inability to intersect with these encounters is profoundly seated in his own life:

Was it possible that I was looking at myself laughing, dancing,

singing, gliding with my hips to express my joy ... ? Had I denied

all this in me? If so, then why was it that when I'd tried to sing,

as a child, I'd not been able to? Why had my hands and feet,

all my life, failed to keep time? It was useless to say that I'd

inhibited myself, for my inability to do these simple things predated

any desire, conscious or unconscious, on my part. I had wanted to,

because it had been a part of my environment, but I had never

been able to! (BP 57-8)

During his years overseas, Wright's mindset expanded to incorporate a multinational perspective towards the problems with which he has grappled throughout his life. This conceptual framework he formulated has carved his reactions to these encounters and set up the ideological limitations of his observations. His intent to explore The Gold Coast was increased when the Gold Coast was heading to accomplish independence from Britain and Dorothy

Padmore prodded this wish (Wallach 153). Dorothy Padmore, the wife of George Padmore,

Wright's close friend and political consultant to Kwame Nkrumah, had recommended in 1953 that he travel to Africa: “ „Now your desk is clear, why do not you go to Africa?‟ The idea was

68 so remote to my mind and mood that I gaped at her before answering” (BP 3). More than being a visit going to the Gold Coast is recognized as experiencing directly the mobility toward independence in the Gold Coast.

It is more exploration into the origins that he devoted his life striving to identify and have an understanding of. However, Wright mentioned an obscure discomfort:

Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and

know something about Africa on the basis of a common “racial”

heritage? ... But, am I African? Had some of my ancestors sold their relatives

to white men? What would my feelings be when I looked

into the black face of an African, feeling that maybe his great-

great-great grandfather had sold my great-great-great grand-

father into slavery? Was there something in Africa that my

feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear

and meaningful? (BP 4)

Richard Wright‟s experience in visiting the Gold Coast caused a crisis of concepts that he tried to solve. He was faced with a plethora of notions such as man, nationalism, race and communism.

Each concept expresses narrow identification and commitment.

The initial pages of Black Power divulge a perplexed Wright, a man who seemed

“cornered, uneasy ... on the defensive, poised on the verge of the unknown” (BP 5). He exclaims:

„Africa!‟ I repeated the word to myself, then paused as something

69

strange and disturbing stirred slowly in the depths of me. I am

African, I‟m of African descent … Yet I‟d never seen Africa.

I‟d never really known any Africans; I‟d hardly even thought of Africa.

According to popular notions of „race‟ there ought to be something of „me‟

down there in Africa. Some vestige, some heritage, some vague

but definite ancestral reality that would serve as a key to unlock

the hearts and feelings of the Africans whom I‟d meet. I wondered,

„what does being African mean?‟ (BP 3-4)

In spite of considering his heart and that of the Africans “beat as one” (BP 77), it is clear that

Wright felt perplexed by the African visit and doubted that there is anything African about his life. The freedom battle in the Gold Coast offered the perfect forum for Wright to communicate the opinions he previously had been developing for years since his political discussions with

Sartre and a number of participants surrounding Presence Africaine. Then, as Constance Webb asks in her biography, “was Wright afraid of discovering?” (325). The response to this question is sophisticated and provides further insight into Wright's ongoing difficulty with flight and his inability to determine completely with any one setting. The idea of a trip to Africa baffled

Wright because he still deemed himself a Westerner: “I was gazing upon a world whose laws I did not know,” Wright writes in the opening pages of Black Power, “upon faces whose reactions were riddles to me” (BP 37). As a clever observer, even though he was not embarrassed with being of African descent, particular sections of Black Power emerge from Wright‟s Western sentimental responses to Gold Coast sights.

70

Wright was amazed, sometimes troubled, by the open nakedness that encircled him, talking about multiple times the Ghanaian women's “elongated breasts that flopped loosely and grotesquely in the sun” (BP 129). Yet another occasion he reports: “I stared upon the half-nude black people. What unabashed pride! … I was amazed at the utter asexuality and the mood and bearing of its people!” (BP 59). If he had not been astonished by the several sexual advances from native prostitutes, he definitely observed a single view that “provoked in [him] a sense of uneasiness on levels of emotion deeper than he could control” (BP 110). Blair indicates that

Wright‟s description creates a “stoppage of time,” and strives not to take Gold Coast Africa out of time in the mode of the primitive or radical other, but rather to allow Wright to dwell in his own vexed relationship with its multiple, fractured traditions (67). That is, the images that

Wright portrays to depict the African lifestyle might be a cultural practice that arouses a sense of dissociation.

While he proceeds to declare that “the bafflement evoked in me by this new reality did not spring from any desire to disclaim kinship with Africa” (BP 67), Wright sustained a unique attachment to America after his departure from it. Part of the reason he decided on exile is that he was unable to associate with the people with whom he lived. In Black Boy Wright had written:

Hunger for insight into my own life and the lives about me,

knowing my fiercely indrawn nature, I sought to fulfill more

than my share of all obligations and responsibilities …

the more my emotions claimed my attention, the sharper …

became my desire to measure accurately the reality of the

71

objective world. (282-3)

Wright has strong desire to investigate the world around him to have more understanding of himself. However, that Wright continued to be deeply concerned about American reaction to his exile works suggests he was feeling a strong affinity for his country until his death. Wright exhibited a similar emotional connection to Paris. As we have observed, he quickly established residency in exile: “Paris was his refuge from the growing hysteria of anti-communism in

America and practically a second home” (Fabre, UQ 354). As Constance Webb highlights,

Wright “wanted some small vestige of doubt to remain [his views toward Africa] so that he could feel that maybe somewhere there was a homeland” (Webb 525). That is, Wright had always regarded himself as a “marginal” man, an outsider, and now, having established himself in Paris, he did not like to hazard relinquishing the first security he had known as an adult.

Thus, in the first wide-ranging journey through a developing country, Wright‟s problems with flight continued. Sometimes he noticed himself protecting the very principles he had assaulted since his revolutionary days as a Communist in the 1950s—some of the material advantages that accompany a capitalist modern society, for example. This platform often kept

Wright separated and confused. By the end of Black Power he reviews his distinctive situation as a black Westerner in black Africa:

If you are a tribal stranger you seek out your tribe and you are

taken care of. If you are a European you seek the shelter of the

European community. But an American Negro is an oddity;

he has one foot in both worlds and he pays through the nose

for what he gets from each. (BP 315)

72

Yet, Wright “was ... at another turning point, comparable to his successive departures from the

South, Chicago, and New York” (UQ 383). And though he “did not actually leave France ...

1953 seems to mark his spiritual departure from Paris and Europe” (UQ 383). His intellectual dedication forced him to reach out, to search for new answers, to discover “what does being

African mean…?,” to find out “how much of [him] was African” (BP 4, 5). Wright‟s solution to this dilemma was through investigating these concepts in reality. He was able to transcend these narrow circles and move to a wider broader concepts that go beyond the borders of nations and the color of skin and political ideologies; he adopted a transnational world view that served as an umbrella he could include minor concepts. Wright considered himself as a citizen of the world, lived the problems of people in different nations and continents and worked to find solutions to global issues.

Returning to the country of his ancestors, Wright was dismayed to discover that the detribalized African and the only people who possess his perspective of freedom were exactly those whose culture had evoked in him the preliminary emotions of disgrace. The African masses, conversely, like the sharecroppers of Uncle Tom’s Children, desire freedom, but they are uninterested in ideas more than that:

Almost the only ones who answer his cry of nationalism-at-any-price,

nationalism as a religion, are the tribes who are sick of the corrupt

chiefs, the few who share his emotional state, the flotsam and jetsam

of the social order! But, things being as they are, there's no other

road for him; and he resolves: „So be it ...‟ (BP 237-238)

73

Wright‟s point of view of the nationalist revolutionary ingrained with a new experience of life because of his connection with the West is extremely similar to the surrounding conception of

Black Boy, where Wright represents himself as a rebel against the cultural order whose need for personal and political freedom is first cultivated by his contact with banned publications. At one level, Wright projects his own living onto that of the frontrunners of African liberty in the Gold

Coast. On the other hand, however, Wright‟s confrontation with Africa taught him that he was inextricably relevant to America and the West.

In cultural terms, Wright found it difficult to identify with the African viewpoint towards the world or to understand the cultural imperatives underpinning the tribal identity. The color of his skin and the fact that he was of African ancestry was less essential to Wright than the fact that both he and the Africans had both experienced under white oppression in different parts of the world. Even the idea of a common political history under colonialism was not sufficient to overcome certain fundamental dissimilarities. The clear letter to Kwame Nkrumah which wraps up Black Power tends to make numerous referrals to conventional African life: “gummy tribalism,” “the stagnancy of tribalism,” (BP 344) “the morass of a subjective darkness,” (BP

346) “Mumbo Jumbo” (BP 347). In short, Wright makes no effort to conceal the disregard for the conventional African past. On the other hand, Wright‟s view of the “New Man”, represented by Kwame Nkrumah along with the leaders of African nationalist struggles, is the political equivalent of the consistent and fully developed concept of alienated man. Thus, social and political progress should overlook the unimportance of color, race and citizenship in determining one‟s loyalty and affiliation. There should be something that is beyond these factors that decides our personality and gives us self-realization and identity.

74

Wright specifies common feelings of emotional gap as he watches some Africans dance at a political rally. His response to them prompts one of the most remarkably personal responses he has toward anything he witnesses in Ghana. Old feelings of disengagement and a regretful drawback are created as he watches these Africans dancing:

How much am I a part of this? How much was I a part of it when I

saw it in America? Why that peculiar, awkward restraint when I

tried to dance or sing ... The crowds surged, danced, sang, and

shouted, but I was thinking of my mother, my father, and my

brother ... Had I denied all this in me? ... Why had my hands and

feet, all my life, failed to keep time? It was useless to say that I‟d

inhibited myself, for my inability to do these simple things

predated any desire, conscious or unconscious on my part. I had

wanted to because it had always been a part of my environment,

but I had never been able to. (BP 59)

This unusual conclusion reveals Richard Wright‟s willingness to dance; this action may help him flee from the stressed pressure and anxiety that overwhelmed him through his life. Perhaps he have not been inflexible, grimly severe and self-conscious, who by his own admission could only access and expend his feelings through writing and reading. At least, he seems open to the idea that black people supposedly have a natural ability to dance. Wright strongly demonstrates his

Western style of reference during a funeral ceremony as he refuses to see the dances as a feasible form of community expression. This rejection may be partly as a result of his incapacity to focus on the dancing itself since he thinks he is being observed, knowing that his position as a

75

Westerner makes the Africans become self-conscious and judged. He hesitates before getting into the service and desires that being black will allow him to blend in: “Ought I go in? They were black so was I” (BP 187).

When he sits down he presumes the position of a fairly neutral viewer and without irony frequently asks the wrong question. He cannot take the reasons given to him why the Africans are dancing and is informed twice that they are dancing because a girl has passed away, and he persistently believes the answer to be unsatisfying. Finally he declares, “[t]hey were black and so was I but my blackness did not help me” (BP 192). This particular experience with Africa does not provide Wright a resolution to the dilemma of identity; rather, it intensifies and complicates the question, heightening the sense of his minor bond to conventional African culture and underscoring his ambivalent connection with the West. During his trip to the Gold Coast,

Wright spoke on the same platform with Kwame Nkrumah, had substantial discussions with the leaders of the opposition: Dr. J.B. Danquah and Dr. K.A. Busia. Wright traveled deep into the interior, trying to glean some understanding of the basis of the independence challenge, all the time carefully searching his emotional and rational responses to the complexity of African life.

He prowled through the roads and around compounds of Accra, met with as many Africans as he could, struck up interactions with British colonial representatives and businessmen, attained interviews with traditional leaders, and had many talks with the African bourgeoisie.

Wright‟s responses to the cross-section of Gold-Coast culture are complex, but many of his preoccupations in Black Power recall the continuing themes of his fictional works. At one level, Wright interprets the modern African personality as the destroyed product of a European colonialism which had irrevocably bungled the integrated and natural life of traditional Africa by

76 presenting alien traditions, laws and religious beliefs. This is a common theme in Richard

Wright‟s works as it applies to the African American experience. On the other hand, Wright obviously was not organized for the moments of daunting filth, disease, and deterioration he found among the Ashanti, the traditional culture least affected by the incursions of European colonialism.

It is here that Wright‟s doubt and hostility toward tradition comes out as an essential dimension of his exploration. Wright identifies the Ashanti as a people totally dominated by a religion which instructs them to live in fear and mindful of the dead ancestors. Unable to distinguish between fantasy and fact, the realm of the spirits, they are ill-equipped to meet the challenges of modern lifestyle. Wright‟s review of the Ashanti matches in a very vital way to his attack on African American conventional ideals in Black Boy. In both cases, he looks at tradition as a pressure that connects the individual to the past in a damaging way, combating the appearance of individual awareness and dooming the culture to a worldview dominated by lack of knowledge and superstition.

Therefore, Wright was against the one-way method that there is one way, one truth, one lifestyle. This approach to things is so extreme and fanatic that he recoils from it. This idea is true about the natives of the Gold Coast and the Westerners or colonizers. The Africans did not allow The Westerners to penetrate the African culture because of the fanatic adherence to values and traditions, and the Westerners considered the African culture as primitive and backward that should be totally changed. Wright suggests embracing dual, multiple systems of creating social and cultural beliefs to penetrate the reality of African society and to enhance complex but at the same time modern society.

77

One may mix and merge with the other culture in order to progress and at the same time not lose the essence of his/her identity. In other words, Africans could embrace Western values that will help them develop and get rid of some superstitions in their lives while they still can hold on a sense of tradition. But it is not necessary to discard much of the tradition under the name of civilization, which may cause irreparable damage not only to the material culture but also to the minds of people. In fact, this is the dilemma that African people as well as Richard

Wright was cautious about. And that is why Wright was sometimes careful about expressing his view points. If he considered himself solely African, the ideas would be turned upside down, or if he just visited Africa with the affection of a patriot coming back to his promised land, wright‟s ideas would be static and vacant of the will and power of a loyal citizen.

In his anatomy of Gold Coast society, Wright reserves his toughest critique for the black bourgeoisie, who keep a striking resemblance to their African American counterparts for whom

Wright held much disregard. At the beginning of Black Power, Wright relates an amusing encounter on board ship with a judge of the Nigerian Supreme Court, a smug, pompous individual who comes forth as the prototype of the African elite. He distinguishes himself completely with his British masters, even to the extent of adopting similar cultural and political views. Wright's favorite image for the goals of the African elite is the figure of an African clerk draped in heavy English woolens in the sweltering heat of Accra (Reilly 261).

Wright looked at Africa with the vast space allowed to him, but the way it was organized was inadequate. He does not want to stay in this stagnant space because it seems to him stifling and frustrating. Racism and all kinds of mistreatment are prominent in Africa. Africans are exploited and humiliated by the colonizers. Therefore, if the situation stays as it is there is no

78 way to achieve progress and to be happy with it. Wright was concerned that the African people were suffering, marginalized, and exploited.

He is harsh with narrating some scenes in the African community. This harshness comes from concern about the African; it is not that he hates the people rather it is an eagerness to seize an opportunity that he does not want to be squandered. So much could have been achieved and so much assistance could have been given to the improvement of Africa. So it can be inferred that Wright feels bitter when he looks at the status quo in an African nation like Ghana. But he feels that it might be possible to change the status quo if the human and material resources were invested in the right way. His main goal is to reform the way people live and to push them towards modernization and self-awareness.

He is suspicious of the rapid movement towards African freedom, showing the colonial position that the African masses are not yet prepared to control themselves together with his own concerns that his hard-won and risky social position would be compromised by African liberation. In Black Power Wright‟s sympathies clearly position him with Kwame Nkrumah and the leaders of the Convention People‟s Party, yet, paradoxically, it is primarily the political level of Gold Coast society which continues to be aloof and, at same phases, unfathomable.

From the beginning of Wright‟s experience with Nkrumah, one detects a tension, a gulf which sets apart the two men. Wright's honest directness is welcomed with reserve in a community which prefers interlocution, and often his inquiries go unanswered. On at least two distinct instances Wright relatively oversteps the boundaries of diplomacy and these occasions come to be costly mistakes of decision. In the first event, Wright is thunderstruck by the ritual of oath-taking which holds people to the CPP and precipitously requests a copy of the pledge from

79

Nkrumah, Nkrumah disregards the request and the connection between the two men is drained during the remaining day.

On the second occasion, Wright asks if he can give a copy of the short speech he has made to the CPP to a regional news media reporter, Nkrumah again refuses to accept his demand.

Wright experiences the same feeling of distance and reserve among a number of the officials of the CPP. Unable to penetrate their reticence about the objectives and aims of independence in the Gold Coast—and this is the masterstroke of Black Power—Wright attempts to reconstruct the personalities of the African leaders. He makes his observations in part on what he knows about them and partially on what he has witnessed during his gatherings with them, but more importantly also on what he knows about himself. For in Wright‟s representation of these men, he views his own life mirrored.

The leaders of the African self-reliance fight are true outsiders, according to Wright.

Educated by Christian missionaries, they are split away from tribal life, combined with a deep sense of disgrace for their cultural past, and initially strive to establish themselves with their new teachers. As a result of their experience of Western education, they develop a real sense of individual value, a sense of future, a belief in the inviolability of the human individuality.

They look for redemption in Western terms, yet eventually discover that the West is incapable of exercising its moral precepts and, consequently, the disinherited Africans discover that they were cast into a no-man's land, located somewhere between the tribal past they have disowned and the Western world which denies them. If they go overseas to attend colleges in

America or Europe they are impressed by the scientific and industrial accomplishments of the

West, as they contact the attraction of Western culture; however, they discover that the freedom

80 and the material advantages of this world are kept beyond their reach. It is out of these types of encounters and yearnings that nationalist movements emerge. At this point, Wright describes the state of mind of the African who is transplanted in France, England, or America:

Strangely, he now yearns to build a land like France

or England or America. Only such a deed will assuage his

feelings of shame and betrayal. He too can be like they

are. That's the way to square the moral outrage done to

his feelings. Whether America or France or England have

built societies to the liking of his heart no longer concerns him;

he must prove his worth in terms that they have taught him. (BP 237)

The most informing case is that Wright is asking how he does not accommodate with or connect with Africa and Africans. Not surprisingly the approach to the question, the presumptions Wright brings to it, and the reasons he ascribe to himself depicts diametrically contrary and enlightening variations. Richard Wright, the ex-Communist, existential thinker, the militantly rationalist and modernist person of the Western enlightenment, brings Africans transplanted in the West to the task. Wright brings out his longing for assimilation and his dilemma stems from the past they forgot and the present that rejects them.

Although he is black, his referrals and beliefs are all strictly Western. He takes an unsparingly scientific materialist approach to Africa. His project is a task in conventional

Western social science. To him, traditional African lifestyle and the “African personality” is either secondary or inhospitable to the economic arrangements and the social and political procedures he encounters as fundamental to the development of the “modern,” “efficient,”

81

“civilized” African modern society that is his actual challenge. A secular man, he is uncomprehending and suspicious towards (is in fact alienated from and hostile to) all expressions of religion—the “spiritual,” “mystical,” “irrational,” “hocus-pocus” of conventional African culture which he recognizes basically as encumbrances from the past. He regards himself as a resolutely modern man, an “intellectual,” a category not appropriate for traditional African culture, looking to a materialistic future with desire and apprehension. While of “African descent,” Wright is expressly “not African.” Of that he is certain. “I understood nothing” (BP

127) becomes his constant refrain after every practical experience of any distinctly African social occasion.

Wright, on the other hand, declares that his greatest confidence is to depict the mental deterioration of subjugated peoples in order to indict oppression in the most explicit manner. In his eyes, his rationally educated awareness of, disbelief in, and distance from Christianity, capitalism and Communism permits him a “dreadful” detachment with which to assess the effects of persecution. The question is if this “dreadful” objectivity serves a larger objective or is just an expression of Wright‟s decision to eliminate himself from individual identification with a group toward whom he has traditionally maintained a deep experience of disappointment and impatience.

In Black Power, Wright devotes a considerable part to detail what he believes comprises the African identity. His realization is that the African identity is extremely childlike, stuck by bewilderment and disgrace, and consequently defensive. Could he imagine that such people could give up this culturally driven worldview to become modern? He also contends that an

African‟s individual autonomy is severely restricted by a deference to a fictional world, yet he

82 questions the capacity of as an effective remedy for this problem: “I was literate,

Western, disinherited, and industrialized and I felt each day the pain and anxiety of it. Why then must I advocate the dragging of these people into my trap?” (BP 147). He surprisingly acknowledges a colonizing reaction in himself: I wanted them to redeem themselves ... with what godlikeness we all thought of the lives of others … But was not my yearning for them predicated upon the premises of the British ... their (African) participation in the world was what I was hungering for...Why? Was it just my pride? ... But, if not that, then what? I didn‟t know” (BP

148). The contradictions increased when his preachment to Africans points out that the redemption of modernity needs willpower and self-sacrifice is much sterner than that suggested by a Christian missionary. His exegesis was also predicated on Western social vanity inspired by the same goal: self-redemption through the conversion of others. Yet, at the same time, he thoroughly identifies with Africans in a defined “ambivalent attitude of love and hate that he felt toward almost everything Western” (BP148).

In Africa he may happen to be searching for freedom from his long term sense of individual alienation from his race, yet was that enterprise doomed to collapse due to his self- doubt? A great deal of the information in Black Power is comprised of engagingly reflective rhetorical inquiries. This is a question that considers and contests. What Wright determines is deficient in the African‟s psychology and sophistication; and how this undermines his initiatives to move from colonialism to self-reliance. Like Black Boy, Black Power is largely a stern warning to a Western and white readers on the dire effects of tyranny, negligence, and own culpability since “THE WEST IS BEING JUDGED BY EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRE IN

AFRICA” (Wright, “Apropos Prepossessions” xv). As a thoroughly Westernized writer himself, he speaks to this target audience, educated on the history of Africa only by British colonial

83 literary works, and so makes the choice to identify Africans as deteriorated subjects of colonialist exploitation.

In talking about his goal for traveling into Africa, Wright asserts that the questions of what being African signifies and how he could be African are for him much more imperative than the present political circumstances in Ghana. “Was there something in Africa that my feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear and meaningful?” (BP 4). This purpose is at odds with his insistent denial of the existence anywhere of widely possessed racial qualities. Nevertheless, his previously kept values are questioned in Ghana by common forms of emotional expression: “My problem was how to account for the “survival” of Africa in America when I stoutly denied the mystic influence of „race‟” (BP 67). Sticking to the notion of race and narrow cultural views impede progress.

His impulse to achieve some type of unity with Africans is encumbered by his concern about the question of African participation in the slave trade: “What would my feelings be when

I looked into the black face of an African, feeling that maybe his great-great-great grandfather had sold my great-great-great grandfather into slavery?” (BP 4). His most tangible connection to

Africa is that the exploitation of black people in America was “predicated upon the presence of

African blood in one‟s veins” (BP 5). Thus his identification with Africa took its origin from the consequences of on Africans through the diaspora since he believed that what described black Americans was their psychological responses to tyranny rather than the reaction to peculiarly African ethnic responses.

In the course of Black Power, he records about the politics, religion, behavior, and customs of a people so mysterious and far-off that “there was nothing [there] that [he] could predict,

84 anticipate, or rely upon and, in spite of [himself], a mild sense of anxiety began to fill [him]” (BP

37-38). Wright persists, “I found the African an oblique, a hard-to-know man who seemed to take a kind of childish pride in trying to create a state of bewilderment in the minds of strangers”

(BP 85). Wright‟s anxious response assists demonstrate how he was consumed emotionally in the traditions of his own time, a product connected with his own western world. But Wright‟s identification with the West runs further than simply homophobia. It came from his native land, where he too was conditioned to believe that sometimes even the black man fared much better in

America. The black American was just like the Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants, who were more militantly American than most native-born Americans. Because he was not included in the dominating American culture, regardless how evasive that term might be, the black American had to confirm his Americanism. Sometimes his passionate identification with America went over and above assimilation, as Wright explains:

so long had Africa been described as something shameful,

barbaric, a land in which one went about naked, a land in

which his ancestors had sold their kith and kin as slaves-

so long had he heard all this that he wanted to disassociate

himself in his mind from all such realities. (BP 66)

Kevin Gaines, for example, reconsiders Wright from the perspective of diaspora. In

“Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora,” Gaines requires us to view Wright to be a supporter of the black diaspora that does not follow the more

“conventional usage” of “describing a state of alienation resulting from a physical exile or displacement from an ancestral homeland” (77). Rather, Gaines proposes, Wright‟s assessment

85 of anti-colonialism in Black Power and The Color Curtain “recasts diaspora as the mobilization of black modernity in the direction of a transnational and transracial community of struggle”

(76). Just like Gilroy, Gains touches on the transnational and transracial aspects of Wright‟s;

Gains does not elaborate that Wright perspective was transnational concept of Black diaspora.

No work of Wright‟s better exhibits this contradiction than Black Power. Wright‟s travelogue about his trip to the British Gold Coast remarkably reveals not only his failure to deliver a politically appropriate account about Africa, but also—less often observed—his incapacity to surpass his own claim to be a rootless man, at home in the world. As its title suggests, Black Power is a record of Wright‟s own uneasy connection with the challenge of his

“African heritage.” Confronted with “fantastic scenes” (42) filled with “half-nude black people,”

“monstrously swollen legs,” “monstrously unbiblical hernias” and other monstrosities (43),

Wright regularly interrogates himself, looking for how and when he is able to or must correspond with them. And, more often than not, he shudders with Western negative reaction and delicacy.

He is unable to comprehend the sight of publicly exposed black breasts, refers again and again to those “long, fleshy, tubelike teat[s],” “some reaching twelve or eighteen inches . . . hanging loosely and flapping,” which African women “do not bother” to give their babies in front of men

(BP 42). Nor can he, the atheist, acknowledge tribal ritual or superstition. He interprets these as instances of a pre-modern irrationality which makes the Gold Coast “pathetic” culture far inferior to the Western rationality he is acquainted with. And life in Accra itself ends up being a lot for him, frustrating and gross:

The kaleidoscope of sea, jungle, nudity, mud huts, and crowded market

places induced in me a conflict deeper than I was aware of; a protest

86

against what I saw seized me. I waited irrationally for these fantastic

scenes to fade; I had the foolish feeling that I had but to turn my head

and I‟d see the ordered, clothed streets of Paris. (BP 42)

Passages of this kind have captivated the ire of Anthony Appiah. The opening scene of

Black Power, in which Wright ponders his possibly “strange and disturbing” racial relationships to Africa, “evokes nothing so much as “Conradian dread,” according to Appiah, who notices that this fear is "intensified, no doubt, by the thought that Wright, the Afro-American, already has the horror stirring „in the depths‟ of him, even in the tranquility of Paris” (“Long Way” 178). The criticism by others that Wright approaches Africa with substantial bitterness and personal animosity is seated in what he was genuinely able to understand while there. His artistic option was to focus on negative thoughts and the bleakness of life and his language always displays that. The issue for critics is whether one interprets this language as evidence of Wright‟s exposure and disapproval of the outcomes of white supremacy or of a denial of himself and other black people.

Wright does not, perhaps cannot, detach his multicultural beliefs from their recognized

Americanness, not even in the late 1950s, after having a decade of expatriation. “American” ideals, many of which he is able to only experience in a non-American frame, tend not to, for all that, cease being American for him. This is the challenging nature of traditional inflexibility: it would not be totally renounced or left out, because it forms how we observe and consider, and perhaps the way we imagine a various means of experiencing or contemplating. That is why, as

James Campbell has noted, “[i]nnumerable African American travelers in Africa have experienced . . . moments of disillusionment, moments bringing them face-to-face with Africa‟s

87 unfamiliarity and their own painful Americanness” (211). We are able to go across the world, but can never quite eliminate our emotional and rational baggage. It is important, however, first to be aware of this case and second to find assistance from some other to progressively surpass it by using an exchange of inconsistent views and ideologies.

Wright‟s moment of hesitation discloses the important flipside of an honest and goodwill driven involvement with new contexts, new ideologies, and new ethnic area: the interrogation and renegotiation of where one comes from. This is why Malian writer Manthia Diawara calls

Black Power a “magnificent book.” Regardless of all the problems that the travelogue shows,

Diawara is seriously satisfied by Wright‟s vulnerable self-exposure of his inconsistent feelings of

“identification and estrangement, love and hate” toward the Africans as well as toward his own background (72). It is through such regular interrogation of currently kept prejudices, through

(often unpleasant) self-awareness, that the multicultural has the chance to not only better understand the cultural Other, but is also much less determined by the society that shaped her.

Diawara thinks that steps such as these were in effect “replacing white dictatorial rule with an

African one, preparing the ground for an even more oppressive and archaic system of rule based on magic and superstition instead of science and objectivity. Why did the African, once he had found the tools of liberation in modernity, have to revive the traditions which oppressed African women and opposed the creation of secular and democratic institutions?” (71-2). Diawara claims that Wright‟s prescription for the implementation of modernity in Ghana shows his concern for the continent‟s future in lieu of his contempt for the Africa he observed while there. However, it is beneficial to recollect that Wright‟s revolutionary perspective was afflicted by an inability to grant any importance to expressions of culture, which often can reinforce cohesion and galvanize groups of people to a collective objective or objective. Franz Fanon, in his recognized work, The

88

Wretched of The Earth, analyzes the way the “native intellectual,” or Third World leader, deals with and processes the fervent and in most cases disorderly yearnings of his people. Fanon was greatly occupied with whether the “native intellectual” would utilize the faith of his people to demand that they steadily accept the ideals of modernity. He cautions against being the

“uncritical mouthpiece of the masses” and creating the “people dream dreams” rather than being focused on more viable political programs of action. “If nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism.” Fanon emphasizes “it leads up a blind alley”

(204).

Wright‟s rejection in Black Power of a „racial explanation‟ for his being in Africa does, then, perhaps not necessarily ought to lead, as Appiah has insisted, to a “paranoid hermeneutics”

(181). We could claim instead with S. Shankar that, rather than expanding paranoia during the course of initiatives to “reconcile a typical racial history” and a “historical gulf” between

Africans and African Americans, Wright “introduces a into the discussion.”

Instead of wholly identifying with either “(black) race” or “(Western) culture, Wright chooses to make his stand on the ground of [transnational and transracial] politics” (Shankar 15). This move, Shankar suggests, is made possible only due to Wright‟s anti-essentialist position on race, and, I want to emphasize, because he had become conscious of the problems implicit in racial identity politics.

Wright‟s position demonstrates that of an artist who is able to rationally form a world from a narrative distance, and his political predictions for Ghana, though reasonable, might not be totally feasible. Wright ends Black Power with a mandate for Nkrumah to move the “masses”

89 from their “primitive” thinking strategies into political intricacy. Possibly hardly any other part of Black Power was more of a lightning rod for criticism of Wright‟s severe condescension and disgust for the Africa he observed than his final demand for the continent‟s “militarization.”

Wright describes his concept of militarization in a personal letter to Prime Minister Nkrumah that appears at the conclusion of Black Power. Wright forewarns that an implementation of this directive would require the kind of thinking that “cannot be done by men whose hearts are swamped with emotion...You must be hard...Our people must be made to walk, forced draft into the twentieth century” (Cromwell 385).

The main task for Nkrumah in Wright‟s demand for militarization is to start a process that will reverse the psychological hindrances caused by the African‟s belief in “mumbo jumbo” (BP

347). Wright‟s concept of African militarization needs sacrifice, self-discipline and an intentional cohesiveness that can be modified from the currently “truncated tribal structure in

Africa.” He stresses that this is not a call to get a military dictatorship. Wright was requested by

Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, to deliver a short talk at a large out of doors rally to Nkrumah's devoted supporters. Wright spoke:

I‟m one of the lost sons of Africa who has come

back to look upon the land of his forefathers.

In a superficial sense it may be said that I'm a

stranger to most of you, but, in terms of a

common heritage of suffering and hunger for

freedom, your heart and my heart beat as one. (BP 77)

90

Certainly, as he highlights repeatedly in Black Power, Wright was acutely aware of the commonalities between the West African country and his native America. He believed the local people were subject to the same political and economic problem that had held back weak black people in Jackson, Memphis, Chicago, and New York.

As a text which appropriates the literary qualities of Wright‟s earlier fiction, Black Power heightened the author‟s transnational perspective which had been growing since his self-imposed exile in 1947-1960. It alerts that unless the colonialists reflect on their part in the developing world, they would confront serious outcomes. Wright‟s chilling announcement after his introduction attests towards the significance of such a reassessment:

Africa challenges the West in a way that the West has not been

challenged before. The West can meanly lose Africa, or the

West can nobly save Africa; but whatever happens, make no mistake:

The West is being judged by the events that transpire in Africa! (BP xv)

While he is dumbfounded that Dr. J. B. Danquah, Nkrumah‟s nemesis and one of the several intellectuals whom he sat down with, regarded himself as both a Christian and a pagan, Wright consents a number of Danquah‟s arguments in his book The Akan Doctrine of God. He accepts the Akan‟s belief within the Golden Stool, such as the cross in Christianity a symbol which manifested the spirit of the African nation. Wright also shows other similarities to Christianity as that in certain African belief systems there is a “direct line of relation” from the individual

“rising by degrees, to the great god who rules all things” (BP 215). What Wright objects to are the traditional priests and priestesses who, still wielding major authority in the Akan and Ashanti tribes, attempt to reverse the little development that had already been accomplished. He believes

91 they hunted for approaches to conserve a tradition that maintained Africans susceptible and subservient to foreign lands.

As Nkrumah‟s autobiography, I Speak of Freedom, attests, spirituality displays a vision for all men. The stockpiling of atom bombs did not measure a nation's success, Nkrumah argued.

Only by placing faith in “the innate respect for human lives,” in “deep-rooted wisdom and dignity,” could a nation emerge as a spiritual leader. As Nkrumah writes, the indestructibility of a “Great Power” is built “not on fear, envy and suspicion, nor won at the expense of others, but founded on hope, trust, friendship and directed to the good of all mankind” (Nkrumah xii). This outlook on life echoes a similar one Wright had been developing for almost ten years with members of Presence Africaine. It brings out an obvious philosophical change, displaying how

Wright concerned himself with greater and more significant issues which influenced all men, regardless of race or color. Wright realized the challenges Nkrumah faced. According to Wright there was just one logical response to the numerous problems of the Africans. He enforces that

There is but one honorable course that assumes and answers

the ideological, traditional, organizational, emotional, political, and

productive needs of Africa at this time. African life must be

militarized ... I‟m speaking of a method of taking people from

one order of life and making them face what men, all men,

everywhere, must face. (BP 346)

Of course Wright did not predict an easy victory for the Africans. Hardened by the experience of his youth, Wright asserts: “There will be no way to avoid a degree of suffering, for suffering comes to all people” (BP 350). Wright discovered that Nkrumah had “within [his] power the

92 means to make the suffering of [his] people meaningful” (BP 350). Hardships were unavoidable, but the times were ripe. Most of the country was supporting their leader. “There was no turning back; historic events had committed the Africans to change ... For good or ill, the die was cast.

The game was up. What had been done could not now be undone. Africa was moving” (BP 285).

In his review of Black Power for the Chicago Sunday Tribune, David E. Apter wrote:

“Wright demonstrates little understanding of the difficulties of social transformation, and indeed shows shockingly little respect for the people of the Gold Coast and their way of life. He feels so strongly that social life there is governed by magic, by the irrational, that he does not credit the accomplishments of the Africans themselves. He plays into the hands of the very people he dislikes by reinforcing their prejudices with his own” (Reilly, Critical Reception 253). Almost every reviewer agreed with Apter's opening comment that “Richard Wright has written a strange and disturbing book” (Reilly 253). In Black Power Wright challenges both the West and the

Gold Coast. In his first book of nonfiction since Black Boy, Wright returns to the skills which had motivated his apprentice works as a reporter. As with any qualified reporter, Wright‟s

“reactions were open and direct and [he] could not order them otherwise. When something struck

[him] as being strange, [he] erupted with questioning . . . When [he] was curious, [he] dived headlong to uncover the obscurities” (BP 137). The West must eliminate the realm of the

“backwardness” that weighed down numerous developing nations. Wright believed in a westernization of the Third World, of subjugating the poorer nations to such western values as a powerful work mentality, cause and effect rationale, and technology, as long as the Third World were devoid of the white man‟s racism. Only then might a transnational, modern-world society be achieved.

93

As outlined by Wright the people of the Gold Coast must interact personally as well:

“The African had a mania for hiding the facts of his life,” Wright writes, “yet he hid those facts in such a clumsy way that it made others know he was hiding them. In short, African secretiveness defeated itself by calling insistent attention to what was being secreted” (BP 107).

The Ghanaians were like Bigger Thomas because they too had survived in closed conditions.

Bigger considered living on his own, but he paid for it with his life. Wright acknowledged that people in many cases are distracted by their traditions. That is, just as Bigger ended up being trapped in “a city where people have grown so used to gangs and murders and graft that they have honestly forgotten that government can have a pretense of decency” (Wright, “Bigger” xxvi), so too were the Ghanaian locals distracted by the tribal mindset that maintained them attached to an outdated age. Wright presumed the Ghanaian people ought to be forced into the twentieth century. As he suggests throughout the book, they could maintain specific manners to be able to keep a feeling of social identity, provided those customs did not impede an endeavor at modernization.

Wright‟s rhetoric of inclusion is a trope he uses in Black Power, but his reflections do not represent sole American and Western connections. In Black Power, Wright claims that what white and black people share is more psychological than cultural and largely demonstrates that

Wright‟s Western perception of Africa where, he believes, both black and lead miserable lives. He speaks about how a person reacts to his experience in Africa and tells his readers that

[o]ne reacts to Africa as one is, as one lives. Africa is a vast,

dingy mirror and what modern man sees in that mirror he hates

94

and wants to destroy. He thinks, when looking into that mirror,

that he is looking at black people who are inferior, but, really,

he is looking at himself and, unless he possesses a superb

knowledge of himself, his first impulse to vindicate himself is to

smash this horrible image of himself which his own soul projects out

upon this Africa. (BP 158)

Over the following sentence, however, Wright turns this unfavorable sentiment into a positive one. Wright describes his subjects as sufferers who eventually come to be transnational representative, working with confidence to improve their lives.

To avoid a biased and sentimental tone in the remainder of the Nkrumah letter, Wright applies significantly ambitious language to define himself to be a transnational representative of change in lieu of an American or African, informing the African leader to become one, too. He proposes that the new Ghana will not come out with “men whose hearts are swamped with emotion,” and he urges Nkrumah to act by militarizing the regular, social lives of the African people “not for war, but for peace; not for destruction, but for service … not for despotism, but to free minds from mumbo-jumbo” (BP 347). Wright believes that such rational preparation will eliminate the tribal mystical beliefs and drives them from their “tribal cobwebs” (BP 347).

Stated at the conclusion of his journey, this nerve-racking motion to act speaks also of

Wright‟s own capacity to more completely crush his one-dimensional opinion of the Gold

Coasters and himself. With such powerful point, Wright illustrates his own verbal part in effecting the militarism he preaches about to Nkrumah. Using one metaphor after another, he assures the leader that “[w]ith words as our weapons, there are some few of us who will stand on

95 the ramparts to fend off the evildoers, the slanderers, the greedy, the self-righteous! You are not alone” (BP 351). No longer feeling separated within the continent he just visited, Wright‟s widened perspective—enhanced by his written analysis of the Gold Coast—energized him to complete what he advised Black American in Black Boy earlier.

Wright tried to produce a wider, transnational perspective in his way of dealing with political and cultural issues in Black Power and the African experience. Unlike Patricia

Williams, who stressed that “[u]niformity nullifies or at best penalizes the individual. Non- interpretive devices, extrinsic sources, and intuitive means of reading may be the only ways to include the reality of the unwritten, unnamed, non-text of race” (Williams 117), Wright emphasizes that self-fulfillment is not attainable through blank oneness or blind undifferentiated sameness. This situation of homogeneous usually causes sense of an anxiety about the status of the real in the human subjectivity, description of transcending racism, a paralyzing uneasiness that may arise from following Williams‟s conformity principle. However, Wright calls for transnational and transcultural approach of life by mixing both originality and modernity and for reconciling differences between the African and the West. While he realizes that some backward racial and cultural habits should be sacrificed, he still supports the craving for difference and satisfying the forms of variations. Wright in Black Power does not totally reject his African,

American, or Western affiliations, but he tends to objectively highlight points of weakness caused by limited national and racial attachment. Wright suggests solving this dilemma though adopting transnational, wider scope of vision in order to achieve progress at the social, cultural and political levels.

96

Chapter Two

Constructing Community: Overarching Global View and Philanthropic Appeal in Wright’s The Color Curtain

I. Wright’s Transnational Journey from Africa to Asia

As discussed in the previous chapter, Richard Wright‟s visit to Ghana was a defining experience in his worldview. Wright not only felt uneasy concerning African culture and traditions, but also in various locations in his book he sounded ambivalent. This sense of ambivalence provides him with the opportunity to investigate and evaluate his experience from a broader perspective. Wright‟s uneasiness forms the foundation of the conceptual framework which structures the ambivalence at the center of his non-fiction work. The uneasiness and ambivalence help to clarify Wright‟s inclination to look both forward and backward. Black

Power is an improvement in Wright‟s transnational vision. At the same time, The Color

Curtain, which is the main focus of this chapter, is not less significant than Black power in its review of racism and colonialism and in Wright‟s advancement towards humanist, global, and transactional doctrines in working with nations of different racial and cultural backgrounds.

Additionally, this chapter examines Wright‟s The Color Curtain, where transnational comparisons of Wright‟s experience as an American and his fast growing sense as a world citizen to reconsider systems of belonging of , especially through transnational connections that redress unjust treatment by the nation-state. Transnational connections made

Wright aware of other ethnic groups‟ social marginalization and accounts of injustices. For that

97 reason, the Third World community created connections to these other ethnic groups in the pursuit of transnational, multiethnic interpersonal justice.

There is an additional impulse in Wright‟s The Color Curtain, one which proposes that his point of view on other people is problematic and that others‟ viewpoints should be observed. For instance, in this work, Wright endorses that the opposition to incorporating others‟ ideas into one‟s own will hamper authentic change. In fact, his encounters at the conference validate for him the vulnerabilities of permitting the binary nature of the three-world composition to determine relations, particularly when it comes to the recently unbiased nations of Asia and

Africa. To put it differently, Hakutani highlights that the political discourse in The Color Curtain

“brings home a prophetic argument that Asians and Africans must acquire the basic idea of democracy and freedom from the West” (Hakutani, “Journey into Asia” 64). Wright comes to comprehend the absence of political encounter of Africans and Asians when he recognizes that many intellectuals view capitalism and communism as merely two types of the same Western reaction to dominate vulnerable nations and wrest self-determination from them. Moreover, this will likely guide to massive resistance and bloodshed no matter which of the two worlds endeavors to apply its power. As a result, in order to accomplish self-reliance with smallest pitfalls Asians and Africans should collaborate with the West to establish modern political system to organize their countries and the lives of their people.

The Color Curtain among Wright‟s nonfictional writings just like Black Power and

Pagan Spain deals with the challenges of racial discrimination, colonialism and neo-colonialism.

In The Color Curtain, Wright enunciates the effect of colonial influence upon the mindset, culture and, heritage of people. He also detects how racism affects the African and African-

98

American communities; he deals in greater details with the harmful impact of colonialism on people and envisions an exploitation-free society. Since he does not possess a clear ideological position, Wright does not establish an efficient community in which people determine their destinies. Nonetheless, by recurrently bringing forth the downsides of racism, colonialism and neo-colonialism and by presenting the true image of the exploited societies, Wright plays an essential part in originating a new awareness among exploited people and eliminating the stereotypical visions created from the colonial contact between Asia, Africa and the West.

Nonetheless, The Color Curtain acquired some controversial critiques in the American newspapers. For example, Tillman Durdin in New York Times book review recognized Wright‟s account of the conference with the exception of exaggerating the religious and racial connections involving the Third World nations (Fabre, UQ 424). In the same manner, in his review “Through

Coloured Glasses,” released in Encounter, Mochtar Lubis criticized Wright‟s racial views. Lubis says: “The majority of the people with whom Mr. Wright came into contact with Indonesia … belong to the new generation and are the least racial and colour-conscious of the various groups in Indonesia” (qtd. in Fabre, UQ 425). Wright‟s reaction revealed integrity and solid tone: “I did not see through „colored‟ glasses nor did I feel it with a „religious‟ skin.” (Fabre, UQ 425). While

Lubis‟s title of the review has racial ramifications, Wright‟s reply settles down any dispute about his outlook. No matter the individual‟s age, race or culture, Wright stressed notion of “religious skin,” which emphasized the revered connections among all people: humanity. It is crucial, here, to cite Gilroy‟s examination of Wright‟s rational legacy that was sometimes misinterpreted or misrepresented. Gilroy affirms that Wright‟s “intellectual legacy is especially interesting because it has been so routinely misunderstood. The depth of his philosophical interests has been either overlooked or misconceived by almost exclusively literary inquiries that have dominated the

99 analysis of his writing” (Black Atlantic 147). Gilroy‟s quotation should urge critics‟ points that

Wright urges his critics to move beyond the face-value of Wright‟s later works and study its profound, enough to possess substantial, philosophical and intellectual connotations.

Other critics have challenged the neglect of Wright‟s later works. One of these critics is

Cedric Robinson, who perceived as a leading thinker in the Western Marxist tradition (304). In spite of this, over time Wright happens to be most frequently linked to the three publications he published in his thirties, before he left the United States for France in 1946: Uncle Tom’s

Children, Black Boy and Native Son.

Moreover, since Paul Gilroy‟s The Black Atlantic appeared, numerous critics have paid attention to Wright‟s later works. Many of these scholars expand on Gilroy‟s affirmation that

Wright was obviously a significant thinker of Western modernity, who searched for multiple

“answers to the questions which racial and national identities could only obscure” (Gilroy, Black

Atlantic 173). One of these critics Kevin Gaines reconsiders Wright from the viewpoint of diaspora. In “Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of

Diaspora,” Gaines requires us to view Wright as a supporter of a black diaspora that does not comply with the conventional usage of “describing a state of alienation resulting from a physical exile or displacement from an ancestral homeland” (77). As a substitute to this state of alienation, Gaines indicates, Wright‟s deliberation of anti-colonialism in Black Power and The

Color Curtain re-forms “diaspora as the mobilization of black modernity toward a transnational and transracial community of struggle; Wright‟s texts can be read in the context of his participation in transnational politics of decolonization” (76).

100

Another critic who has drawn attention to Wright‟s later works is Virginia Whatley

Smith. In Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections, Smith argues that Wright‟s works are eclectic travel accounts which integrate the fields of literature and journalism. Hakutani‟s

“The Color Curtain: Richard Wright‟s journey into Asia” explores Wright‟s humanistic thinking that emphasize multiculturalism and “peaceful coexistence of diverse cultures” (69).On the other hand, in “Richard Wright‟s Passage to Indonesia” Virginia Smith emphasizes the literary and journalistic value of The Color Curtain. Smith indicates that Wright‟s travel to Asia gives him the freedom to express himself as “writer/narrator and participant”, characteristics that his home country has denied him (81). While my study will elaborate on Hakutani‟s humanist aspect of

The Color Curtain as a path to multicultural worldview, Smith‟s obsession with Wright‟s racial and previous experiences in America will be dodged. This study will highlight that The Color

Curtain not only shows Wright‟s change from his inability to address his traumatized memories to his full-fledged participation in Bandung conference and surpassing the ethnic and national barriers. As a transnational agent among cultures, Wright often adapts as he crosses national boundaries to fit localized conditions.

Nevertheless, Delbanco underestimates the value of Wright‟s travel heritage. He contends that it is a profound irony that the arc of Wright‟s career moved downward after Native

Son because of his refusal to be imprisoned by the thematic of race. His move to France, where he partook of the prestige attached to the man of color in exile from the crass United States, did not enlarge him as a writer (Delbanco 187). Native Son was indeed the book Wright swore to write so that “no one would weep over it,” the book that “would be so hard and deep” (“How

„Bigger‟” 30) that it would deny its readers “the consolation of tears.” It was the first book that

101 forced Americans to take their racial fears seriously, and it did so by turning their most vicious thoughts against themselves.

Wright became, perhaps, a more humanist artist. Still, as Baldwin said, speaking from within the same paradox, Paris “would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports,” and “[i]t did not seem worthwhile to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one” (Baldwin, Nobody Knows my Name 185). In his moving eulogy, Baldwin reflected that Wright was “one of the most illustrious victims” of “the war in the breast between blackness and whiteness” (Price of the Ticket 287). Writing in the heady atmosphere of postcolonial possibility, Baldwin added that “it is no longer important to be white—thank heaven—the war in the breast between blackness and whiteness” (Price of the

Ticket 287). Such a termination of difference was Wright‟s hope. His work was a plea that racial identity be submerged in the colorless fact of being human. But his enduring greatness as an artist will be owed to his unprecedented ability to convey the horror of being black in America.

What he wished for was to lose his subject. After reading Native Son, no one can doubt his willingness to make the sacrifice.

Even though Baldwin suggests a dissolution of difference, he does not do justice to the role of Wright in attempting to solve this problem not only on the national but on the international level. This study argues that Wright‟s later non-fiction works is the crown of his literary career. Though the study will not focus on Wright‟s Native Son, this work of fiction that established Wright‟s reputation was the beginning of literary success. Wright‟s character representation is comprehended as a characteristic of Wright‟s leaving American regionalism.

Wright‟s empirical voice situates him a powerful narrator, unrestricted by bonds of regionalism

102

(Robinson 64). Wright carried with him on these travels the set of conceptual structures he had devised, under the Chicago school. The epistemological charting tool had given him the means to know his own story at home in African America. As an African American, using the instrument he could work with a feeling of confidence that his had prepared him to know.

Since his uneasy and ambivalent experience in Ghana, Wright appeared as a transnationally distinguished writer and a rationally independent-minded intellectual, and a bold and open activist and critic related to nationalism and racism. In “Cultural Identity and

Diaspora,” Stuart Hall points out that “[t]he diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (235).

Similarly, Wright‟s travel writing in different continents examines the means he defines and represents himself in relation to multiple communities. His travel allows him to establish broader space of identification which is more habitable than a particular home country.

When the mid-century advanced, Wright viewed himself progressively more as a partner of a Third-World intellectual caste. Wright had been always moving around beyond his comfort zone instead of taking up the conveniences of a stagnant position. As Edward Said reveals,

Wright fits the profile of an intellectual for whom exile “ means being liberated from … following in time-honored footsteps are the main milestones. Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up because you cannot follow a prescribed path” (Representations 62). As he describes in his autobiographical work Black Boy, he has been racialized as being a Black. However, Wright could not remain in

America because of the complex, essentialist American notion of nationality that associate race

103 and participation in social networks to provide a national identification during that time. He did not want to write and view the world from an essentialist African American perspective.

However, Wright has uncovered from African tribes‟ traditions and habits that he is not entirely African, and his identity should be more complicated compared to a simple one-sided individuality. Although he journeys Ghana, Wright cannot turn into an African. He always feels uneasy about the people and culture in that African country where he imagines that it can end up being the Promised Land: the land of his ancestors. He appears as though he has no home and thinks about himself as not African, not American, and not an authoritative, confident individual.

Wright breaks through his personal isolation by recognizing the restricted and limiting nature of national identity through his transnational association of African American identity with world citizenship.

II. The Bandung Conference and the Third World

Often, he moved perfectly into a more expansive view of transnationalism towards the colonized, although with a significantly sharper anticolonial edge. Bandung was a significant moment for Wright, one that he would most likely endeavor to reproduce upon his retreat to

Paris by preparing meetings for African diaspora intellectuals and activists. A couple of years later, he joined the Bandung Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. For Wright, this ended up being a conference of tremendous benefits since twenty-nine free and self-governing nations of Asia and Africa met to debate “racialism and colonialism” (CC 13). Bandung Conference intended to consider “problems of common interest and concern to the countries of Asia and Africa,” and explore “ways and means by which their peoples could achieve fuller economic, cultural and

104 political co-operation” (Lauren 165). In numerous ways, Bandung represented a finale of racialized and colonized people‟s sustained endeavors at accomplishing world transformation.

As just stated, transnational networks of anti-imperial and anti-racist activists mobilized the integral moment that the Bandung Conference represented. Oppressed people imagined the meeting as “a turning-point in world affairs,” promising optimism for a more peaceful and impartial future “not only to the newly independent and still poverty-stricken peoples of Asia and

Africa but also to all the subject peoples of the world,” along with the “downtrodden and the underprivileged of the advanced countries themselves” (Lauren 166). While race has become thought of historically as a core arranging factor for the occasion, in actuality, it was central only insofar as it was a product of the worldwide system of oppression that racism rationalized and maintained. At its base, what drew “black, brown, and yellow men” together at Bandung was what had drawn activists collectively across races and nations at other critical moments in the twentieth century. Through their challenges towards racism and imperialism, oppressed people had designed a politics that was dependent on a unity of view that functioned across difference and was empowered by an abiding hope for a future in which humanity would be transnationally recognized through a dedication to peace and justice for all. To Wright, as a transnational humanist, the broad unity that Bandung manifested was suggestive of an international solidarity.

In addition, Wright opposed the practice of subjugation of one group of humankind by another and even if he was the product of oppression. Wright‟s stance is distinctive since he belonged to a minority racial group which experienced the most detrimental type of racism. This kind of racial discrimination on the part of the white Americans was just a manifestation of colonialism. Such oppression is apparent in The Color Curtain which is ingrained with Wright‟s

105 intense depiction of both his racial and colonial experiences. Composed in self-exile far from the native land, The Color Curtain is a serious attempt to grasp the damaging results of colonialism on the psychology of the colonized within the Third World nations. His thought about the connection between racism and colonialism is possibly similar to that of in the post-Second-World War period. Ellison noticed that the possibilities of race problem for art had in fact elevated and never decrease. Ellison states that he “ exist[s] in a field of influences, both personal and environmental; but despite this obvious fact you go on reducing the complex field to a single writer and implicitly to the race of that writer” (Callahan 35). Hence, Ellison suggested that the American race problem grew to become similar to the world predicament of colonialism that reduces the allegiance of the writer to a single race. Ellison‟s compelling feeling emphasizes his obligation to follow certain stream of thought in his writing. Unlike Ellison,

Wright fought to get hold of the allegiance of those white and non-white nations which were capable to remain away from the hegemony of communism and colonialism.

In addition to possessing diverse views and encounters, Wright had an outlook and goals that were not controlled by alien forces. From his nonfictional works and the fact that he took part in political activities in earlier times, apparently Wright backed a politics which might get rid of exploitation. As politically-conscious author, his distinct perspective toward colonial exploitation and works described the strategies of oppression and exploitation and their impact on the thought processes of both the victim and victimizer. He also articulated the challenge of both the individual and community towards such oppression. In his writings, there are also suggestions to overcome, if not noticeably convert, the problem created by colonialism.

106

Wright‟s account of the Bandung Conference deals explicitly with decolonizing nations of

Africa and Asia. His concern about the characteristics of the three-world division of the globe, a global structure in which the first two worlds seek to subsume the third, non-aligned world into by itself. He comes to realize that this geographical representation is baised in perspective given that it is not able to speak for the non-aligned nations‟ viewpoints or recognize their particular possible contributions to renovating global relationships beyond the Cold-War state of chaos.

This type of regional myth is extracted from the standpoint involving the first two worlds, and the beliefs upon which it is based have much in common with the common journey narratives written from the perspective of the Western imperial nations. Such an imaginary isolates distinct geographical locations and places them in an evolutionary, historical queue in which the inhabitants and cultures of some areas are stuck in the past (Lisle 203). In this case, the traveler might experience a fond nostalgia that these places might stimulate; nonetheless, the traveler will also undoubtedly realize that the way forward to the future can only be accomplished through immersion into the modern cultures, which includes the culture of the traveler. This immersion recognizes down the coeval nature of other ethnicities and recommends that they are introduced to the present via the modern cultures, regardless of the effects they have on their ways. Even though he exposes such thinking in his work, Wright is not free from espousing it as a result of his assertions of and affiliation with Western ideology. Evidence of this is available throughout his texts, especially in the notions of the primal and progress that one finds in them.

Touring in the Gold Coast, Spain, and Indonesia assured Wright that there have been plenty of international occasions that determined the current form of the entire world. He confessed to

Reynolds that his non-fiction is fueled by “so many more exciting and interesting things happening in the world that I [Wright] feel sort of dodging them if I don‟t say something about

107 them”(UQ 407). By 1955, the matter of black Americans, to which Wright referred as a child play “gripping Asia and Africa” (CC 178), no more distracted his ideas. Wright‟s fascination with the Third World had now swapped out his interest in the race dilemma in his native land. It turned out natural, then, that Wright responded with excitement when learning about the

Bandung Conference, which was a summit of non-Western countries that aimed to examine, among other things, the social, economic, political and cultural challenges the countries had in common. Bandung, which was “smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces” (CC 14), has been the first of its sort and manifested for Wright a forum in which Third World frontrunners could get together and dispute several of the fundamental conditions that had fascinated him since his conversations with Sartre, de Beauvoir and members of Presence Africaine about ten years earlier.

In the opening pages of The Color Curtain Wright can hardly hide his excitement after reading about the conference in a newspaper. He writes:

Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Africa and Asia are meeting

in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss „racialism and colonialism‟ …

What is this? I scanned the list of nations involved … Only brown, black

and yellow men who had long been made agonizingly self-conscious,

under the rigors of colonial rule, of their race and their religion could

have felt the need for such a meeting. There was something extra-political,

extra-social, almost extra-human about it; it smacked of tidal waves,

of natural forces … And the call for the meeting had not been sounded

in terms of ideology. (CC 11, 14)

108

These points not only offered Wright a platform from which to assemble data concerning the fundamental behavior of colonized people toward their lives and countries, but a comprehensive base for many of the more essential problems and concepts he had been striving to put together in his nonfiction over the last few years. Wright‟s premises articulate Robert Gross‟s perception of transnationalism as “a world of fluid borders, where goods, ideas and people flow constantly across once sovereign space” and where “ new comers sustain a cosmopolitan consciousness, while older minorities, notably African American, reconceive themselves in international terms”

(Gross 378). Equally, Wright exhibited how he was grappling with issues that concerned all men, issues whose answers would impact the world over the following thirty years in profound and massive ways.

During 1937 Wright identified his outlook as “a pre-conscious assumption, something which a writer takes for granted, something which he wins through his living” (“Blueprint” 58).

He ends up being self-conscious about his view as a “western man of color” (Virginia Smith,

“Introduction” xi) who was black in his Third World writings. Wright identifies this abundant but ambivalent standpoint as a “third point of view” that was created in the West but that enables him to comprehend anti-Western viewpoints. Although he understands these perspectives, this chapter focuses on The Color Curtain, in which Wright tries to present a vision of a “secular and rational basis of thought and feeling ” (CC 219) that might link the Third World and the West, changing the connective ties of race and religion, as well as the systems of Communism and

Capitalism. His formal affirmation of defecting from the American Communist Party makes obvious his concerns about expanding radicalism. He writes:

It was not the economics of Communism … nor the excitement of

underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by

109

the similarity of the experience of workers in other lands, by the

possibility of uniting scattered but kindred people into a whole.

(qtd. in Webb 119)

Wright believes that he ought to modify attitude in his battle for self-worth and liberation and the specter of a world united and powerful captivates him. Marxism proposed to him that black people should not to be by themselves in their battle for freedom and self-worth. The specter of united, powerful, black and white intrigued him. This unity promised to “form the first sustained friendship in [his] life” (Crossman 105). Wright‟s determination to join this movement was inspired to enhance himself from passive victim to dynamic advocate. He tries to surpass the ruling essentialism of Marxism.

Another important aspect of The Color Curtain is the contrast between his third point of view as a writer and the third viewpoint he presented to the postcolonial leaders at Bandung. The roots of this contrast are found in his analogy between the oppressed situation of African

Americans and that of people of color in the Third World. Understanding these roots requires us to briefly trace the development of Wright‟s political and literary perspective in his nonfiction starting with the early essay, “ Blueprint for the Negro Writing,” and culminating with The

Color Curtain. In The Color Curtain, Wright declares that “the impact of the West had a liberating influence” (46). Wright designates himself first as a guide and later as a coordinator capable of offering the forces of Bandung meaning beyond nationwide and racial identifications.

When Wright explained his “third point of view” in 1956, he was reworking his concepts about the political function of the African American writer in the emerging context of the Cold

War, decolonization in Africa and Asia and his own exile in Paris. Wright had first articulated the political role of the African American writer in his essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” This

110 essay explains an approach to “Negro writing” that purposely opposes the strategy of the New

Negro Renaissance or , famously summed up by James Weldon Johnson in the Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson argues that “[n]o people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior”

(9). Johnson emphasises the role of literature in raising people‟s consciousness towards critical social, and global matters. Johnson believes that literature is the effective way to change the prevailing attitude toward black people. He states: “[N]othing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art” (9). Johnson is urging writers to embrace a mission to change the dominant backward mindset.

Wright tried to set up a unique literary style throughout his career. He detached himself from the wide-ranging black community, who searched for parity by replicating white forms and themes, making them “prim and decorous ambassadors who went begging to white America”

(Wright, “Blueprint” 52). He was engaged, instead, in literature and art that addressed the

“needs,” “sufferings,” and “aspirations” not only black people but also people from different racial and national backgrounds. In other words, “Blueprint” does not encourage a separate cultural reality in the form of folklore or black . Moving from his perception that “[t]radition is no longer a guide” (“Blueprint” 60), Wright entices writers to change and surpass such cultural collectivities and stresses separate cultural reality in the form of folklore or black cultural nationalism.

Together with the growing in his professional life, to Wright Bandung conference was worthy of traveling half-way around the globe for. Wright made the decision instantly to go to.

111

Reporting on such a conference intended another literary risk. “I‟ve no illusions about how people in America feel about straight reporting like this” (qtd. in UQ 421), Wright writes in a letter to Paul Reynolds, his agent, after he had come back from Asia. He told his wife prior to departing for Indonesia, “I know that people are tired of hearing of these hot, muddy faraway places with people yelling for freedom. But this is the human race speaking” (CC 15). Wright regarded himself the optimal media reporter for a conference like Bandung. He considered himself as a self-appointed historian and assumed his ideas and findings accurately resembled the key worries confronting the human race. In The Color Curtain, Wright details his skills for reporting on the conference. When inquired by his wife how he would probably “report on twenty-nine nations meeting,” he responds:

I feel that my life has given me some keys to what they would say or do. I‟m an American Negro; as such, I‟ve had a burden of race consciousness. So have these people. I grew up in the Methodist and Seventh Day Adventist Churches … and these people are religious. I was a member of the Communist Party for twelve years and I know something of the politics and psychology of rebellion. These people have had as their daily existence such politics. These emotions are my instrument. They are emotions to try to find out what these people think and feel and why. (CC 15)

Hence, in The Color Curtain, Wright hints at another pause in flight. This passage symbolizes one of his boldest assertions on the subject. Bandung provided all the right components: race, color, religion, and politics. Wright needed to submerge himself to feel comfortable at home. He mentions his previous life experience to draw on commonalities between those around him and himself.

112

After participating in the conference Wright unveils the close interconnection he experienced with the human race in diverse areas of the whole world:

In my questioning of Asians, I had one tangible factor in my favor,

a factor that no white Westerner could claim. I was „colored‟ and

every Asian I had spoken to had known what being „colored‟ meant.

Hence, I had been able to hear Asians express themselves without

reserve; they had felt no need to save face before me. (CC 25)

This quotation explains his authenticity and the reliability of what he is reporting on this conference. Even though color can be a barrier to his transnational thoughts, he sees that the

Asians feel comfortable to open up with him. Wright moved as an independent reporter “in order to ensure that his statements on colonialism and the Third World would in no way be controlled or censured,” explains Fabre (UQ 417). Wright himself was not a national leader and for that reason could hardly be a delegate. Bandung‟s organizers, brought about by Indian Prime

Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, did not allow observer status to uninvited countries such as the

United States, nationalist movements or individuals. With no alternative route to go to the conference, Wright obtained entry using a press pass, as did many others who travelled to the conference as unofficial experts. Individuals with press passes outnumbered participants by far.

G.H. Jansen states that working as “newsmen ... outnumbered delegates by two to one; 655 newsmen dispatched 280,000 words a day” (187). Most of the journalists obtained their unofficial status with the support of dinners and tea parties, backroom meetings, and press conferences. Therefore, Bandung was an informative media event as much as a convention.

113

Additionally, Wright presumed that he had to look into the misguided beliefs the West had about the conference. “I just can‟t whitewash the Western world when the whole issue about that world is the role it has played in the last 500 years,” Wright wrote to Reynolds. “The world‟s press sabotaged Bandung and did not give the full picture” (UQ 421). As he discloses in The

Color Curtain, it was “strange, but, in this age of swift communication, one had to travel thousands of miles to get a set of straight, simple facts … Propaganda jams the media of communication” (CC 100). Wright believed that one of the primary ironies in the twentieth century was the media's capability to rotate the facts. Once the individual voice could travel all over the world in a few seconds, when man could project his image a thousand miles away.

Wright is fighting against propaganda and its ability to twist truths. He projects himself as a transnational agent, who is attempting to advocate the rights of the people of other nations.

Essentially many of the speeches Wright documented somehow mirrored his own racial experiences, which backed his thought that his being “colored” unified him with the African and

Asian delegates. The speeches also motivated ideas for composing The Color Curtain in which

Wright investigates in depth the consequences of racialism on Third World peoples. Philippian

Romulo‟s appeal, which Wright agreed to, is yet another instance of Wright‟s contention that the situation of the oppressed within a world ruled by white men was usually the same. Obviously

Wright acknowledged the strength of racism and how effortlessly an African or Asian might be taken in by the powerful practices of the West.

Throughout chapter one Wright relates anecdotally how he encountered reverse discrimination by local bureaucrats. One morning when he entered the Minister of Information office for his press card, Wright noticed a white American newspaperman disagreeing with a

114 dark Indonesian official. The Indonesian clearly was not paying attention and appeared as if he had previously made up his mind regarding the unfavorable answer he was planning to offer the

American after he finished conversing. When the official looked to Wright and recognized a dark face identical to his own, he instantly altered his behavior. Wright made a comment about this occasion that racism “is an evil thing and breeds its own kind … [and it] is a loathsome thing”

(CC 115). Wright‟s third viewpoint featured a crucial role in showing his target audience rationally the specifics of Bandung far from being based on political, religious or racial agendas.

For example, President Sukarno's opening comments to the delegates discloses how race preoccupies the representative countries. Sukarno speaks of the typical knowledge of colonialism, which often bred the tension associated with racialism. In the conference, each presenter Wright heard tackles Sukarno‟s comments about race: “A certain amount of repetitiousness drove home the racial theme with crushing force” (CC 153), Wright detects.

Wright appears to tackle a very important element in developing his transnationalism. Wright‟s suffering under racism triggers a strong reaction against this dividing element. He is able to transcend his past negative experience and promotes a worldview that surpasses race fetters.

Sastroamidjojo, Prime Minister of Indonesia, expresses how “racialism as an important source of tension” (CC 142). Racialism, according to the Prime Minister of Indonesia, is “an aspect of colonialism based on feelings of superiority of the dominating group” (CC 142). The plan in South Africa epitomized this experience. Sostroamidjojo comments on the way the discrimination that came about from these emotions as opposed to basic human rights, and that the basic aim of the conference was to find ways to break out of those “forms of absolute intolerance” more befitting the Middle Ages (CC 142).

115

The Chairman of the Philippine delegation to the conference, Carlos Romulo, reverberated comparable comments. Each of the representative nations discussed the responsibility of colonialism, Romulo contended, whereby Western imperial regimes forced “on the people it ruled the doctrine of their own racial inferiority” (CC 151). In possibly the most poetic speech of the conference, Romulo explains the damaging impact of one race feeling superior over another and developing racial hierarchy:

“We have known, and some of us still know, the searing experience

of being demeaned in our own lands, of being systematically relegated

to subject states not only politically and economically, and militarily—but

racially as well. Here was a stigma that could be applied to

rich and poor alike, to prince and slave, boss-man and workingman,

landlord and peasant, scholar and ignoramus … This made the lowest drunken

sot superior, in colonial society, to the highest product of culture and

scholarship and industry among subject people” (CC 151-152).

Romulo‟s speech evokes reminiscences of Black Boy. Even though he previously had not lived in a colonial nation, Wright had experienced under a corrupt “regime” in Mississippi just like the one in Franco's Spain which will be discussed later in chapter three. He ends up demeaned in his land, subjugated to the standing of “nigger,” avoids from securing a respectable education while the white Mississippian wallowed in ample privileges. Wright‟s viewpoint is near to the delegates mentioned in their speeches pointed out a shared experience and history battle, which immediately assures Wright preferential treatment. The white American needs to wait while

Wright is served first. “I was a member of the master race! … I am not proud of it … It was

116 racism,” Wright detects. (CC 114). Wright recognizes the official's measures. He imagines back in the occasions in the American South when he was living the values of Jim Crow. However,

Wright was not happy with this act of discrimination as his growing sense of the world transcends racial segregation.

In this, Wright is following several critics in the field who have pointed to the way transnationalism describes ideals more than current practices. Ania Loomba argues for a renewed focus on the actual material conditions within which identities are formed; it is crucial to

“separate facile or tendentious visions of a neoliberal world-without-borders from genuine and progressive forms of transnationalism,” as well as to “separate the abstract brand of freedom applied by market liberalization across the globe from the internationalist vision of freedom”

(16). Wright‟s reaffirmation of national identity does not deny the importance of his transnationalism. Rather, he is advocating a different way of thinking about it, a less utopian and more realistic way. In order to move forward, Wright allows new people to enter into his life; he recognizes that he must find ways for his natural and adopted roots to merge.

One could be imposing a sentimental wound that would keep lasting marks, “but why worry about that? You are protected; there are thousands around you of your color and, if the man who's been offended should object, what the hell can he do?” (CC 114). Yet Wright was not pleased with what had taken place. This sort of act was unintelligent, cowardly, and transparently racist. Wright delves the matter further:

The racism I saw that morning had its origins in the desire (I think) of

the colored man to put the white man in an embarrassing position, to

sting and hurt him; it was simply a question of color, which was an easy

117

way of telling friend from foe. But the Indonesian had not instituted

this thing; it had been taught to him by faces as white as the American

face that he had spurned. That was how the whites had felt about it when

they had all the power; all dark skins were bad and all white skins were

good, and now I saw that same process reversed. (CC 114-115)

This understanding shows a shift in Wright's perceptive expansion. While he noticed that non- white backgrounds were responding to a century-old tradition of “racial conditioning,” he also comprehended the viciousness of racial discrimination. Having journeyed in five continents,

Wright began to appreciate that racism bred its own kind, and it could be truly human for Asians and Africans to interact in the main evil which had retained all of them downtrodden and enslaved for centuries.

He is not promoting racism, Wright confesses, but just “trying to explain how easy it [is], and with what justification the colored races can and will to some extent, depending upon how ignorant and emotionally wrought up the whites have kept them, practice racism, a racism that they have been taught too bitterly and too well” (CC 115). Wright pities the white Westerner who faced the severe racist risk by declaring: “I‟m perfectly willing for racism to stop. I‟ll support legislation to eradicate racism” (CC 116). Life was not that straightforward and, as

Wright ominously deduce, “life is not that simple. Contrite words cannot now stop profound processes which white men set in motion on this earth some four hundred years ago; four hundred years is a long time … time enough for habits, reactions, to be converted into cultural traditions, into a raison d‟etre for millions” (CC 116).

118

Like Salman Rushdie‟s The Satanic Verses (1989), The Color Curtain, as Hakutani shows, reveals Wright‟s vision that includes “relations not only between East and West, Old and

New, but between the First, Second, and Third Worlds within as well as across national cultures”

(Cross-Cultural Visions 10). Wright, like Rushdie, sees religion as the other aspect of identifying the course of action in the developing world. Actually, at Bandung, “racial consciousness, evoked by the attitudes and practices of the West, had slowly blended with a defensive religious feeling … the two had combined into one” (CC 140). Wright discloses religious awareness that allude to his interaction with speeches delivered by the leaders and delegates from the Third-

World nations. The religious standardization that Wright viewed is enticed by the desire to unify diverse populations in order to form a solid group identity. From this perspective, a kind of transnationalism can be viewed as a natural by-product of the spreading of any religious community: religion offers an umbrella much larger than that of the nation, offering stability in an estranging postcolonial metropolitan area. All that is required is a dedication to that identity at the expense of the localized traditions and quirks of one‟s own.

For numerous decades Asians and Africans, as Sukarno uncovered in his opening address, had been the voiceless ones on this planet; significant decisions which influenced their peoples had been created by others rather of their selected leaders. The West‟s immoral overlook on the destiny of the Third World had left one billion people residing in hardship and mortification. The peoples of the developing world produced little physical power, Sukarno mentioned. Since their economic power was minimal, they were incapable to safeguard themselves with tanks, guns, and ranks of jet bombers. Based on the President, the Third World must mobilize what he referred to as Asian countries, which displayed more than half of the population of the world, required to come together behind the significant force they had in common: religion. Sukarno

119 views: “„Religion is of dominating importance, particularly in this part of the world. There are perhaps more religions here than in other regions of the globe … Our countries were the birthplace of religions‟ ” (CC 139). He considers that by an ethical, religious reawakening the

Third World might gradually guide itself from its breakdown. To Wright, it was on purpose that many of the officials were religious men from profoundly religious countries. Just like the

African American, the Asian and African had been encountered with the belief that they were biologically inferior and struggled to control themselves. Due to the apparent hypocrisy of the white Christian religion, the non-white races clung stubbornly to their own. Thus, a search for an understanding gets straightforward mainly because of the human connections that tie people from different races together. Transnationalism seems something of a lifeline to the Asian communities. But Wright experiences increasing unease even with this more familiar and ostensibly neutral concept—something most clearly observed in his observation of transnational

Christianity in Asia. As opposed to the practice of nationalizing religion, which emphasized individual participation and interpretation, Wright initiates an attempt to universalize Christianity by streamlining it, eliminating various regional differences and rituals for a more hegemonic unification.

At the conference, Wright becomes aware that even though Christianity and Communism are divergent, but they are “not as opposed as one would think. There are deep underground, emotional connections. Seen through Asian eyes, the two philosophies share much of the same assumptions of hope” (CC 168). This undisturbed coexistence of religion and politics makes

Wright realize that there might indeed be some effectiveness for religion, after all, positive outlook he is not capable to convey about the religious practices he talks about in Black Power.

120

Unlike the Asians who followed Christianity to strengthen their platform, Wright can see

Christianity only as having made the natives of the Gold Coast more docile in Black Power.

Even though he had assailed religion in Native Son and Black Boy, Wright also knew the critical function the took part in the black community. According to Yoshinobu

Hakutani, Cross Damon in The Outsider “is the product of the traditional Christianity in the

South that taught black children subservient ethics” (Racial Discourse 187). He had pointed out church was the only secure meeting place and one of the very few prevalent threads joining the black race. Thus, Wright concludes after his visit to Bandung that Asian religion might be suggested if in its relationship with race it disseminated the primary goals of the meeting and assisted the third world combat a force more debilitating than Western imperialism,

Communism. Wright experienced the problems of such a process. He inquiries:

But is there not something missing? Weren‟t all

these men deeply religious? Christians? Moslems? Buddhists?

Hindus? They were. Would they accept working with Red China?

Yes, they would. Why? Were they dupes? No, they were desperate.

They felt that they were acting in common defense of themselves.

Then, is Christianity, as it was introduced into Asia and Africa,

no deterrent to Communism? (CC 167)

Wright disregards the tendency that the two important doctrines of his lifetime, Christianity and

Communism, are opposed. In fact, they had more in accordance than most people believed.

121

As outlined by Wright both concepts were seated in emotionalism and essentially counted on the presumption of desire. Jesus Christ was one of the poorest religious men common to the

Asians. Had a Communist wandered into a colonial community like the ones that was around in

Asia and said, “„I‟ll show you how to implement the Christian vision; I‟ll show you how to make

Christianity come true, how to make the Kingdom of God real right here on earth‟” (CC 168), the Asian Christian, yearning for salvation, graciously could have adopted. The danger of

Communism was a significant matter for the religious-minded participants at Bandung. A number of delegates lashed out at Chinese and Russian foreign policy. Others questioned the affability of the Communist delegates, who shook hands with their former opponents, disregarding past problems and striving to mend old injuries. Few leaders received a remarkable complain. Nevertheless, a fact Wright features towards the shrewd-speaking, mild-mannered head of the Chinese delegation, Chou En-lai. Rather than developing divergence, Chou sought unity and collaboration. He did not attempt mobilizing Asian help for his claim to Formosa, as the majority of the Western press had expected. Genuinely, he relinquished any venture to utilize the Conference to espouse the Communist purpose. As Wright clearly shows, Chou decided to carry out what the West had left out. Considering that it had started its growth centuries before,

China attempts to align itself with the millions of oppressed peoples around the world. Just like the other leaders attending the Conference, Chou denounced the sufferings affiliated with colonialism. He prompted the developing world to look for a common terrain.

Only then could these people achieve shared respect and understanding, only then would they eradicate mistrust and worry most Third World nations had for each other. Wright views that Chou “offered no programs of industrialization, no long-term loans, no mutual defense pacts” (CC 159). The shared experiences he did present significantly outweighed any efforts the

122

West had taken since colonizing the two continents centuries before. Based on Wright, there does not exist “any positive program from the Western powers in these areas. Western academic personnel [was] still discussing whether the Africans [had] the capacity for self-government, a psychological prejudice which no Communist worthy of his salt would ever carry as a handicap”

(CC 163). In the light of absence of roadmap to develop the Asian and African nations, Wright feels the need to build trust among the Third World nations and the West. In short, there should be an intervention from a third party to reconcile opposing views.

So Wright supported former Prime Minister of Indonesia and one of the leading spokesmen for the notion of a Moslem state Mohammad Natsir, who announced: “There will be no need for

Communism in Moslem countries. ... Pan- will represent a world force, socialistic in nature, keeping a middle ground between Communism and Capitalism” (CC 92). Wright backed any religious leader whose “natural mental order,” like Natsir‟s, kept him “more pro-Islam than anti-Communist or pro-Capitalist” (CC 122). Talking to Natsir, Wright believes “that concepts like Right and Left and ideologies, in general, did not figure decisively in his thinking” (CC

120). Wright declares:

I had the feeling that the Indonesian Moslem had a personality that was

intact, poised, healthy, and largely free from neurotic conflict. These

eighty million Indonesians, 90 per cent Moslem, had not been tampered

with too much by missionaries as had all too many Africans. There

was none of that uneasy shifting backward and forward between

two worlds of values and two spheres of psychological being (CC 120).

123

Just like Sukarno, Wright thinks the Natsirs of Asia could use their Islamic agenda to boost themselves, to circumvent the potential for a third party intrusion. They would not be budged on account of concerns about Red China, by the plainly, friendly nature of Chou En-lai. Though subsequent occasions over the years have confirmed several of Wright's beliefs wrong, the chaos in the Middle East, for instance, it continues to be intriguing to note that he sided with the religious-minded to solve the world's troubles. Although he would allude to religion as irrational, he still noticed Communism as greater, more potentially hazardous risk. Fabre verified that

Wright was concerned about the intense sabotage that confronts developing nations: “[t]he task was enormous … and the risk of disaster- when the religious, racial, and emotional forces of these nations were finally liberated” (UQ 424). Therefore, Wright was ready to accept almost any strategy that would cease its improvement. In the last chapter, “The Western World at

Bandung,” Wright makes a pressing demand for support and assistance from the West.

Mochtar Lubis, a Socialist newspaper writer averse to the Sukarno regime, met Wright upon his arrival in Indonesia and served as his unofficial guide. Before the conference, Wright was invited to the P. E. N. Club to talk about African American literature. There he connected with Takdin Alisjabana and other notable Indonesians uneasy with the Asian arts. Alisjabana also introduced Wright to many of the top young Indonesian intellectuals when he invited him to a dinner getting together outside of Djakarta. Through these people, Lubis and others, Wright found out about the political climate encircling Bandung along with their views concerning imperialism and the West‟s inner thoughts of superiority. They served reinforce Wright‟s affirmation that power and avarice determined the issues of humanity and that the developing countries, instead of endorsing good will and applying ideas towards economic growth, involved in methods which kept the Third World backward and submissive to the West.

124

Throughout a brief sightseeing excursion, Wright observed the several commonalities between Indonesia and Africa. As did Accra, Jakarta offered identical “naked commercialism” that surrounded almost all Indonesians in petty trade. Western colonialism had launched this

“feverish activity,” which pressured individuals to market essential goods at exuberant prices to be able to buy inexpensive, often worthless European products. Wright asserts “[t]here is a nervous kind of dependence bred by imperialism: not only are the people taught Western law, ethics, and finance, but they are encouraged to develop a taste, yea, a need, for goods which are only to be had from the European mother country” (CC 112). Wright saw this cycle to be a vicious snare, mainly in the 1950s when developing countries were gradually breaking away from Europe and gaining independence. If the natives made a revolution in the name of Western values, which they often cherished, they could not produce even the simplest goods without

Western aid. According to Wright, the Asian countries suffered the same psychological agonies as Africa. They despised Western domination, but they needed Western technology to modernize: “It is not an easy attitude to hold when you feel that, when you reach out for something you want, you will be clutching bait embedded upon a sharp and cruel hook” (CC

113), and in lieu of obtaining freedom, the Third World noticed itself moving continuously towards re-enslavement.

It is evident from Wright‟s explanation that this impression associated with the purity of the Third World also includes worries of the damaging “Other” that continuously hides away from the space of purity. Wright‟s remarks emphasize the way the Third World countries urged popular imagination to rejoice their sense national, and ethnic connections while reducing their doubts to become impure by the international Other. When commenting on national identity,

Stuart Hall brings up “the Other” is invariably covered within the self of identity and so forms

125 distinct groups of who fits in and who does not: “This is the Other that belongs inside one. This is the Other that one can only know from the place from which one stands. This is the self as it is inscribed in the gaze of the Other. And this notion [of ambivalence] breaks down the boundaries, between outside and inside, between those who belong and those who do not” (48).

Applying Hall‟s ideas to look at Wright‟s remarks about Third World identity through the lens of war and militarism, the dichotomies emphasize the unwillingness to deal with the contaminating nature of foreign Otherness, which usually does not help the developing, growing nations to advance. Wright‟s sensation of greater connections that consider the interest of these types of developing countries demands more complicated modification of the relationship between the East and West. However, it was about Bandung and in the actual conference where

Wright can see “emotional nationalism … leaping state boundaries and melting and merging, one into the other.” (CC 140). Wright‟s phrase “leaping state boundaries” echoes Hall‟s “break[ing] down the boundaries” (Hall “Old and New Identities” 147). Wright, as Hall does, urges to take action and expresses the urgency to move beyond the barriers of nationalism. Michel Fabre explains that Wright “far transcended the level of competent journalism … [and] evoked a complete atmosphere and state of mind, a mixture of racial pride, distrust of the West, and hope”

(UQ 422). Wright nets this character in two ways: by exhibiting the literary qualities of his earlier fiction and by blending Third World nationalism, apprehension toward the West and cautious active transnational outlook. It is this confidence that produces and forms prospective bridges among races and nations.

It is the feasible form of these connections that fascinates Wright; the conference represents mass-meeting of global forces. In its broader sense, Bandung is a meeting of the

126 people who were “ex-colonial subjects, people whom the white West called „colored‟ peoples …

The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting” (CC 11,12). As essential as who had been meeting were the conditions in which they were gathering: “This smacked of something new, something beyond Left and Right,” writes Wright. “Looked at in terms of history, these nations represented races and religions, vague but potent forces,” and most importantly, “the call for the meeting had not been sounded in terms of ideology”(CC 13,14). While Africa had appeared to require a standard racial unity from him, the possibilities for relating to the occasion in Bandung were less proscribed. Wright points out the dilemma of race and nation affiliation as obstacles to bring about transnational perspective.

In the first two parts of The Color Curtain, Wright‟s narrative character is a guide to the conference and its politics, noticing and detailing the public speeches and private rumors he is witness to at Bandung, without offering his personal “new terms.” His observations begin before he reaches Bandung. Half the book, consisting of a single chapter entitled “Bandung: Beyond

Left and Right,” is a blend of interviews with Asians that Wright performed in Europe, newspaper cuttings, and travel explanation of the time he invested in Jakarta with writer Mochtar

Lubis. In these resources, Wright understands the themes of the conference: race, religion, and industrialization: “I was discovering this Asian elite was, in many ways, more Western than the

West.” Wright surmises at the conclusion of his interviews with Asians in Europe: “[Their]

Westernness [consists] in their having been made to break with the past in a manner that but few

Westerners could possibly do” (CC 71). Isolated from native traditions and independent of the colonial forces, the leaders of Asian countries were determined to industrialize to prevent new subjugations, but also intrigued by the irrational capabilities of racial shame and religious pride.

127

Wright applies these findings to the “Asian mind” more frequently:

To the Asian mind industrialization was not a project whose growth

came with time, but a dogma in a religion, something to be experienced

here and now with emotionally charged words; “race” was no longer

a simple designation, nonscientific, of a people and their physiological

differences, but an instrument of subjugation, a badge of shame, a burning

and concrete fact that was proved instantly by the color of one‟s skin ...

Religion was no longer a delicate relationship of a people to the world in

which they lived, a relationship wrought through centuries and embodied

in ritual and ceremony, but a proof of one‟s humanity, something to defend

and cling to (even if one did not believe in it!) passionately, for the sake of

one‟s pride, to redress the balance in the scales of self-esteem. (CC 74)

Wright had already described his understanding of this dominating power in the starting pages of the book, before the interviews, the clippings, and his discussions with Lubis: “Looked at in terms of history, these nations represented races and religions, vague but potent forces,” he said.

While his perspective appears predetermined, that is, the imposition of his personal reservations and ideals onto an abstract “Asian mind,”he clearly transforms into his view of the conference and its opportunities only in the closing two chapters: “Racial Shame at Bandung” and “The

Western World at Bandung.” In these two chapters, Wright trades the persona of the guide for that of the organizer, introducing a vision of growth for the Bandung nations that would substitute “irrational” thinking with rationality and secularism. As a result, following from his concepts of the writer‟s function within Black Power and The Color Curtain, Wright provides

128 not only a rational discussion but also an organizing prospect of the world, a rational agenda that promises the progress of interaction among the world‟s nations.

In the penultimate chapter of The Color Curtain, “Racial Shame at Bandung,” Wright‟s guiding position retreats significantly, while never completely vanishing, even as he feels his viewpoint more vigorously. Although he had already written regarding racial feeling at Bandung, an earlier chapter is entitled “Race and Religion at Bandung,” in “Racial Shame at Bandung”

Wright suggests examining race in another way. As an alternative to picturing race as a possibly optimistic collective identity, an identity, for Wright, would be centered in irrationality, Wright concentrates rather on how mutual sensation of race, that he calls “racial shame,” is a product of the particular social relationships of colonialism and segregation disseminated most intentionally through the imperialist West. By showing the logical causes of racial shame, is an endeavor to change the perspective of the Bandung collectivity from irrationality to rationality.

However, while secularism and reason are Wright‟s watchwords, his approach is still visionary. As an alternative to introducing a realistic debate about racial shame, Wright provides his discussion in the very development of the chapter‟s plot: a list of loosely related episodes and explanations of racism and racial degradation in which Wright is less a guide as compared to an organizer. It is in this chapter‟s construction of anecdotes and images that Wright‟s “third point of view” involves readiness to give an objective perspective. As Paul Gilroy reports that Wright was among those thinkers “who were prepared to renounce the easy claims of African American exceptionalism in favor of a global, coalitional politics in which anti-imperialism and anti-racism might be seen to interact if not to fuse” (Against Race 225). Wright is critical of “racial romanticism” that had fascinated and dissatisfied him in the Gold Coast; for that reason, in The

129

Color Curtain he is informed of how Bandung pledges “a sense of identity, of solidarity, a religious oneness with others who shared [an] outcast state” (CC 177), and “the conference had a most profound influence upon the color-conscious millions in all the countries of the earth”(CC176). Wright‟s change from racial unity to racial shame in The Color Curtain employs his worry that “colored nations” would cut themselves off from the West that had racialized and colonized them, heeding the call of “race feeling” appeared by Sukarno‟s nationalism and developed by Chou En-Lai‟s communism instead. These perspectives of race and nationalism imply that the experience of being an ensemble in the pattern of racial inferiority and the challenge against the resulting complexes generates mutual understanding among those who represents their countries at Bandung.

At the same time, as John Reilly highlights, Wright‟s expertise as an analyzer of the meeting, questioned in some quarters, are established by his comparable connection with what he calls the “burden of race consciousness,” “a class consciousness,” and experience with religion and “the politics and psychology of rebellion.” This, Reilly emphasizes, “is the basis for identification that transcends for Wright any limitations he may feel because of his lack of detailed knowledge of Asia or Africa. ... [His resulting outlook] dissolves secondary differences among the colored peoples of the world and permits him the equations [he makes] between the appearance of Jakarta and Accra, of the peasants in the hills of Indonesia with the country folk of the Gold Coast” (“Non-Fiction” 518). As Wright explains, the Bandung conference can be a competition to establish how commonalities developed by mutual grievances are going to be turned into a different species of loyalty; Wright looks for common factors that enable him to united different viewpoints. This search for common factors is made clear when he meets two

American participants in the conference. Wright‟s turn comes about when African Americans

130 access his consideration. Wright presents two examples Mr. Jones, a mechanic from Los

Angeles, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.— both of whom came to Bandung on press passes— to demonstrate that “racial and neonational romanticism” (CC 178) is not restricted to the particular geography of Africa and Asia. For both men, race beats any particular politics. Mr. Jones pays his savings “and those of his wife” and convinces a newspaper to issue him a press pass so he can make what seems like a religious pilgrimage to Bandung.

Wright observed: “ And brown Mr. Jones, watching the wily moves of tan Nehru and yellow Chou En-Lai, understood absolutely nothing of what was going on about him” (CC 177).

Likewise, though Powell‟s press conferences in Bandung seeks to “defend the position of the

United States in relation to the Negro problem,” to Wright it is clear that Powell had “felt the call” (CC 178) of race:

when the United States was trying to iron out the brutal kinks of its

race problem, there came along a world event which reawakened in the

hearts of its “23,000,000 colored citizens” the feeling of race, a feeling

which the racial mores of American whites had induced deep in their

hearts. If a man as sophisticated as Congressman Powell felt this, then

one can safely assume that in less schooled and more naive hearts it

went profoundly deep. (CC 178-9)

It is obvious to Wright that racial experience is a product of European and American racism.

Throughout the chapter, after that, Wright inspects the origins of this racism, concentrating on types of the “racial mores of American whites” (CC 179) and Dutch “racial conditioning in

Indonesia” to substitute “racial feeling,” an irrational feeling with a consciousness of race. He

131 includes African American characters in this section not to extend a circle of solidarity as much as to analyze the meaning of racial shame at Bandung and clear the way for different connective bonds, namely, what Wright calls “a secular and rational basis of thought and feeling ” (CC 219).

Wright here suggests secular, rational thoughts as solutions to the national, racial, and religious dilemma that hinders his transnational view.

By the same token, W.E.B. DuBois explains how racial distinction in a white dominated world split him up from mainstream society: “This fact of racial distinction based on color was the greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined it, because this surrounding group, in alliance and agreement with the white European world, was settled and determined upon the fact that I was and must be a thing apart” (Dusk 653). DuBois‟ practical experience reflects Wright‟s solitude because each one believes that he has taken part in the white world‟s categorizing of themselves as “a thing apart” from the rest of the community. Moving forward beyond the nationalist and essentialist vision of DuBois, it is crucial for Wright to search outside of national borders, for both America and Africa to ascertain how he makes up his personal ethnic identity.

This transnational endeavor to African American enables Wright to compare himself to another group who shares an equivalent background of ethnic origins and who does not blend confidently inside national restrictions. Wright needs to realise that he is a world citizen, not African or

American, which would otherwise steer him back to a futile challenge to fit his ethnic identity inside a wide range of national conflation of social networks, ethnicity, and race.

To put it an alternative way, Wright imagines an encounter between people from different cultural backgrounds and thinks Bandung as a location where African Americans and other peoples of color could meet and discover what they have in common, without cutting themselves

132 off from the West. Connections between the nascent Third World and the West were just as crucial to Wright as relationships between peoples of Africa and Asia and their since race always denotes a link to the racializing West. “Racial Shame at Bandung” signifies racism as a relationship, and one that always suggests a relationship to the West. Nevertheless, what is most remarkable about this event is the lack of a rational discussion. Wright provides anecdotes which give a “picture of the world” motivated by his individual viewpoint; he presents a vision where the connection between oppressor and oppressed could be instantly understood. Point of view is not an opinion for Wright but a method of seeing. Margret Walker notices Wright‟s persistent aspiration as reasonable, not radical; it is “ to have an ordered, rational world in which we all can share” (202). As she described perceptively, Wright‟s harmonized mind and body

"wandered over the earth seeking always common ground of humanity” (212). The hard work to uncover a prevalent humanity to “bind men together in a common unity” (CC 24) mirrors

Wright‟s overriding fear of primitive violence that he considers seated in religious extremism and racism.

Wright presents himself in this chapter in the same way he shows himself a year later at the Presence Africaine conference in Paris: “I see and understand the West; but I also see and understand the non - or anti-Western point of view.” in “Racial Shame at Bandung,” Wright characterizes himself as distinctively in a position to “see” from Western perspective—both black and white—as well as from the anti-Western perspectives of racialized communities in the nascent Third World. Yet throughout The Color Curtain, and particularly in the narrative of encounter he constructs in “Racial Shame at Bandung,” non-Western points of view—especially folk and tribal ways of seeing, those subaltern voices that had not been trained by the West— remain willfully beyond his prospect. There is not any value in native traditions for Wright. He is

133 thinking about those Westernized colonial subjects whose views, like Wright‟s, have been conditioned by the West, simultaneously that the West helps make them subordinate. If “Racial

Shame at Bandung” brings together any kind of constituency, it is the constituency of racialized subjects both in the nascent Third World and in the diaspora. By bringing together this constituency, whose ambivalence was equal to his own, Wright sets up his declaration in the next and final chapter: “in sum , Bandung was the last call of westernized ASIANS TO THE

MORAL CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST!” (CC 202). Wright here is positive about the capacity of higher awareness that joins the East and West on a humanistic basis. Through human affinity with the West, the East could develop and people can form greater consciousness that permits them to comprehend themselves and the world around them away from national disposition, religion, and race.

To counter what he perceives an Asian-African oneness based upon racial feeling and fear, Wright promises an optimistic critique in the form of his fourth chapter, “Racial Shame at

Bandung.” More than in any of the others, Wright consciously reorganizes what he witnessed and experienced at the Bandung Conference: he replaces racial sentiment with racial consciousness; he establishes himself as a writer not as one who reports but as one who creates meaning and values, a theory he developed in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and he provides a vision of secularism and cause instead of arguing for it, again following from “Blueprint,” in which he wrote, approvingly, that “[i]mage and emotion have a logic of their own” (59). Wright envisions the Bandung leaders as a type of constituency in forming his international view.

Precisely how detrimental such training is, and just how worn out the awakening masses are, is Wright‟s matter in The Color Curtain, his nonfiction chronicle of the 1955 Afro-Asian

134

Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. That convention was a stirring endeavor to call into being a new sort of intercontinental community, and therefore it had remarkable value for Wright. At the conference Wright came face to face with a small group of the kind of men he liked to depict in his fiction; outsiders, lonely men trapped between two worlds and blessed thereby with second sight: men just like himself who testifies above and whom Wright compares to “uprooted

Asians” and “uprooted Easterner” (CC 63,75). What was endangered in the Bandung meeting can best be described by thinking about the destiny, as Wright portrays it, of an outsider of uncommon gifts who detects no community to maintain him.

In The Color Curtain, the family unit to be founded is seen as secular rationalism. For

Wright, the family is the natural example for national and international structure: “I am so fascinated by social science that I can‟t help sharing my investigations,” (Kinnamon and Fabre

209). Wright told one interviewer that “[s]ociety has become an instrument of coercion, whereas the basic aim of society should be unity not oppression … There is continuously a spontaneous regrouping of humans into families. As soon as one is destroyed, another form shows up”

(Kinnamon and Fabre 209). There is no question that Wright, in Bandung as in Ghana, wishes the West to keep its place as head of the household of nations, overseeing—altruistically this time—the division of the world‟s spoils. For this reason he presents and then answers for himself as well as his readers the astute question below: “Is this secular, rational base of thought and feeling in the Western world broad enough and secure enough to warrant the West's assuming the moral right to interfere sans narrow, selfish political motives? My answer is “Yes.”(CC 211)

Wright needs the top of the international household, he envisions, to be drastically less sensitive.

He expects the head, if a philanthropic and sensible world system is to take form, to decrease his

135

“own consumption” in order the increase the income of those who otherwise would suffer. At

Bandung, he was not alone in possessing such commitment.

To make this debate he and subsequent speakers who stimulate related images is of interest to what Royce calls the “loyalty to a lost cause.” The annihilated peoples on whose behalf he talks have lost everything: Everything has been taken away from them into colonialism‟s lifelines. The riches of their soils, the labor of their people, the reverence that once gilded their customs and traditions, the very conceptions of loyalty accessible to them have been exhausted, if Wright‟s accounts are considerably precise. No surprise that, as Wright detects, the conference‟s closing assertion carries “overtones of the stem dignity of ancient and proud peoples who yearned to rise and play again a role in human affairs” (CC 201-202): individuals whose causes are forfeited. Royce demonstrates that there is a unique strength of the devotion to lost causes felt by subjugated nations such as the Jews, the Poles, and the Irish (The Philosophy of Loyalty l28). The hopelessness of defeat can stimulate, he suggests and behave as a spur to remarkable creative imagination. The self-reliance actions that directly or indirectly developed

India.

Indonesia, South Africa, Ghana are a testimony to the fertility of the mixture of despair and yearning of which Wright speaks. Royce notes that centuries of Jewish loyalty to a lost cause

“transformed what were once seemingly insignificant matters of [tribal] politics into the most sacred contents of a world religion” (279-280). Having said that, the independence does not always imply democracy and mobility from the fetters of dictatorship. The justification for this, and perhaps the real reason, had to do with the fetishization of Independence among Wright‟s tragic elite; it had to do with the tragic elite‟s often rigid loyalty to their perspective of

136 independence, and the hypersensitivity among the elite to the hazards to self-reliance as they conceived it. Hence, two years after Bandung, Sukarno announced military legislation and in “an unstable and ultimately catastrophic coalition with the army and the [Indonesian Communist

Party]. . . sought to rescue the fragile unity of the archipelago.” (Frederick and Worden 49).

Sukarno continued, in a common move among successful leaders of decolonization movements, to announce himself President-for-Life. Subsequently, a well-balanced collaboration between the

East and West may be a better alternative to guarantee improvement.

Longing for the risks of independence is evident at the gathering Wright reported: “Each address was directed to the voters at home, to the State Department in Washington, to Whitehall in London, to Peiking, to Moscow, to their own Asian and African neighbors” (CC 170). One delegate tells him, “[W]e were handled as those on the outside wanted us handled … We want to show those people that we can manage our own lives. And this conference is a demonstration of that” (CC 171). Once more, independence is the object of commitment, but it is a liberation from the West that is however independence on the West‟s phrases, often within borderlines set up by the West. Liberating oneself from the West with tools reliable in the West at first glance appears like a paradox. However, one of Wright‟s messages, in The Color Curtain as well as in Black

Power, is that those tools have grown to be universal the way anything does: by universal use.

Wright not surprisingly looks with some bemusement on the initiatives some at Bandung make to be free outside the West to be loyal to their cultures and histories, but with a loyalty determined by European principles of nationalism, and expressed more often than not in

European languages. Wright‟s hint resonates with Felgar‟s observation that the Western culture that the conference was supposed to reject still has a dominant influence (146). Wright highlights that “the strident moral strictures against the Western world preached at Bandung were uttered in

137 the language of the cultures that the delegates were denouncing” (CC 200). Wright‟s Ironic illusion indicates that the Third World still needs the West to progress and express itself at the local and international levels.

Wright determines that something of great value, universality for a better world, is added to Western language and culture when opponents utilize it to light up their situation: “I felt that there was something just and proper about it; by this means English was coming to contain a new extension of feeling, of moral knowledge” (CC 200). Wright‟s own work similarly contributes to the expansion and range of feeling of his native language. His coverage of Bandung, thus, connotes some form of double victory. Addressed to the West, it requests that the West be devoted to its most productive ideas. The implication is that these ideas live not where they develop but where they are held in use:

These Bandung preachments had the tonal ring of a closing of a gap of

history. For, if those past French and English revolutionaries had had the

moral courage to have extended their new and bold declarations of a new

humanity to black and brown and yellow men, these ex-colonial subjects

would never have felt the need to rise against the West. (CC 201)

In the passage, “moral courage” can imply devotion to humanity altogether. The Bandung conference and Wright‟s books are meant to train the East and West in commitment to humankind , in all senses of that word. Particularly The Color Curtain, as Folks observes, tells about Wright‟s independence as a thinker and says much that still deserves considering about the connections of the West and non-Western world (19). Wright‟s account of the conference

138 reveals a dialectical interplay of demands for loyalty in which devotion to independence at the level of countries and freedom at the level of individuals trumps all else.

In the discussion with his wife that starts The Color Curtain, Wright confesses that he does not know for whom he would report on the conference at Bandung, but that he would say “for somebody...” This ellipsis enables him to turn away from the question of audience and back to the significance of the occasion. By the last chapter, where he asserts that the conference‟s final communique is a message, a “last call,” to the “Western World,” his own feeling of audience continues to be unclear or, perhaps, numerous. To shed more light on Wright‟s audience, Paul

Lauren stressed that for participating countries and their sympathizers, Bandung represented “life as against death,” in contrast to the “terror of atomic destruction” that dominated the Cold War

(166). Therefore, his audience addresses a wide array of population beginning from the western world itself, Bandung power, Americans like himself and everyone who is worried about the world‟s well-being. The topic of the last chapter, “The Western World at Bandung,” is the

Bandung communique, a document that Wright believed was a “sober document, brief and to the point” that nevertheless does not “hesitate to lash out, in terse legal prose, at racial injustice and colonial exploitation ” (CC 201). This combined document, in Wright‟s estimation, varies profoundly from the fearful and emotional speeches and conversations on which he based his assessments of race and religion at Bandung.

Because the document addresses the “Western World,” Europe and the United States,

Wright can make an appeal to the West in its name:

I repeat and underline that the document was addressed to the West, to the moral

prepossessions of the West. It was my belief that the delegates at Bandung, for the

139

most part, though bitter, looked and hoped toward the West … The West, in my

opinion, must be big enough, generous enough, to accept and understand that

bitterness. The Bandung communique was no appeal, in terms of sentiment or

ideology, to Communism. Instead, it carried exalted overtones of the stem dignity

of ancient and proud peoples who yearned to rise and play again a role in human

affairs. (CC 201-2)

As always, Wright debated that political modernization and economic industrialization were essential for the Bandung nations to “rise and play again a role in human affairs” (CC 202). The address to the West, however, appealed not only to technical and scientific understanding; it appealed to the West‟s “moral prepossessions” (CC 201)—specifically, the same freedom and equality that had been declined to Asians and Africans under colonialism. Any definite appeal that the communique made was then also a rebuke against Western importance and racial discrimination. However, Wright does not appeal to the civil rights movement in the United

States to which he had little connection; he speaks to Western power—a moral rather than political or economic power—that might assist the Bandung countries. The Color Curtain is not addressed to nor does Wright attempt to represent African Americans.

The target audience remains abstract as Wright describes the ways in which Europe and the United States might answer this call. He gives examples of feasible solutions supplied by two men he meets; tellingly, both solutions come from Americans, not Europeans. The first is an unnamed “highly competent official” who was a “reformed American of the Old South” (CC

210); the second is a liberal social scientist, Dr. Benjamin Higgins at the Center for International

Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Southerner‟s ideas shy away from

140 immediate intervention, choosing paternalism and gradual advancement; Dr. Higgins, conversely, looks closer to Wright‟s thinking, analyzing the “limited, prejudiced theories” (CC

214). For the European imperialists whose attitudes, like the Southerner‟s, are paternalistic,

Higgins supports large-scale technical support and economic “shock therapy” for the former colonies, a plan which, in Wright‟s terms, “makes a Marshall Plan sink into relative insignificance!” (CC 214). Certainly, Higgins‟s plan is a preview of the enormous reorientation carried out by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and Wright considers the plan to be “today‟s typical Western attitude.” While Wright‟s insistence upon the necessity of modernization and industrialization suggests that he would support Higgins‟s vision, Wright rejects this “typical Western attitude” (CC 215). “[Higgins‟s] terms are allied too organically with personal and national interests, to the capricious ebb and flow of that most mercurial of all realities: capital” (CC 219). Wright‟s anti-Communism never transformed him into a promoter of capitalism, and here he anticipates how capitalist development would further the new dominance of the United States.

Wright pays attention not just to the content of the plans but also the relationship they suggest between the West and the Third World. “New terms will have to be found,” he again insists, “terms that will fit the nature of the human materials involved. Moreover, I think that

Bandung, however fumblingly and naively, presented those materials” (CC 220). Most of these new terms seem fleetingly as a joint venture of thinkers in the “East” and “West,” bound not by nation or religion but by “a secular and rational base of thought and feeling” (CC 210-220). As

Rowley indicates Wright‟s later works demonstrate “regretting the emotional force of his writing and beginning to think … that intellectual ( rational) understanding was preferable to emotional participation that left the reader feeling purged” (“Intellectual Exile” 303-304). As a result,

141

Wright created this concept of community at the international level. He illustrates how rational, and transnational identity increased to encompass the ideas of national devotion and to belong to the binary of East and West.

One side of this partnership is manifested by the Bandung leaders themselves: the

Western-educated elite of Asia and Africa: “After all, the elite of Asia and Africa, for the most part, is Western, more Western than the West in most cases” (CC 219). Those leaders like

Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, whose styles of organization had interested him and with whom he experienced a particular affinity, he calls in White Man, Listen! a “tragic elite.” Those are “the Western-educated men striving to make a Western dream come true in non-Western conditions of life” (Wright,

“Psychological Reactions” 41). Wright revealed, and just like Wright himself, “They shared a third but not yet quite clearly defined point of view.” This “elite” seems to embody Western idealism by standing outside of both the West where they were educated and the traditional societies in which they were born.

Both for Wright and for the “tragic elite” he describes, this “third point of view” meant that the more they were educated in the values and morals of the West, the more they understood that these values did not apply to them. However, Wright states that any ideology should enable

“the Negro or Asian or African to meet revolutionary fragments of the hostile race on a plane of equality” (“Psychological Reactions” 45). The “tragic elite” is Wright‟s “echo” in the Third

World, and the analogy between the writer‟s and the postcolonial leaders‟ “third point of view” constitutes the “bridge” that Wright constructs with The Color Curtain. On the Western part of this partnership, Wright identifies a Western “moral right to interfere sans narrow, selfish

142 political motives” that might avoid the vulnerability of Higgins‟s ideas. The new forces to which

Wright gives form in The Color Curtain are not geographic but relational . The nascent Third

World for him is a seedbed for a new man and an opportunity for a different kind of connection between the West and the countries of Asia and Africa. Wright postulates that colonial racism might be swapped out by a unique Western relationship based on secularism and the viewpoints of an “inevitably critical” “tragic elite” and its Western partners-perhaps Wright himself. This ideal, which foreshadows the more recent international culture of human rights and the dilemmas of “humanitarian” military involvement, has an underbelly of negativity in The Color Curtain.

Having declined Western capitalist “shock therapy” and the ferocious industrialization of

Russia, Wright ends The Color Curtain recommending important questions: “Is there no stand- in for these sacrifices, no substitute for these sufferings?” (CC 221). Wright poses these rhetorical questions to indicate the exigency of the situation. These questions imply Wright‟s imploration of the situation in the East; he denotes that there should be an end of the suffering and a reward for the sacrifices. The Bandung conference, according to Kiuchi and Hakutani, taught Wright that the Third World countries in Africa and Asia can be achieved by peaceful coexistence of diverse cultures and the scientific and technological assistance from the West

(Documented Chronology 199). Likewise, while he can map out a picture of the existing world that creates feelings of racial shame, Wright can organize a vision of the world he would like to see. With his secular internationalism only a potentiality, Wright‟s new picture of the world stays and hopes that he will keep fighting to accomplish.

III. The Color Curtain and Wright’s Theory of Constructing Transnationalism

143

With The Color Curtain, Wright moves into a new intellectual phase where his loyalties moved from metropolitan Paris to anticolonial liberation challenges. He contests the Western existence in Africa and Asia but didn‟t question France‟s colonial empire directly. Rather than describing a state of underdevelopment, confining black people to “embryonic thoughts” and an inevitable racial particularism, Wright reconstituted this disidentification from national culture into a site of epistemic privilege, or overdevelopment: “Am I ahead or behind the West?” Wright rhetorically asked, “My personal judgment is that I‟m ahead. And I do not say that boastfully; such a view is implied by the very nature of the Western values that I hold dear.” (Gunnar 55).

According to Fabre, in writing The Color Curtain, Wright experienced that the American public should know as soon as possible what the first meeting of the Third World leaders, organized almost against the will of the West, really expected: “I just can‟t whitewash the Western world when the whole issue about that world is the role it has played during the past 500 years” (UQ

421). Fabre writes of the mid- to late 1950s, when Wright was focusing on The Color Curtain,

“the relationship of Western civilization to the Third World had now replaced the relationship between black and white Americans in Wright‟s priorities” (UQ 422). Wright‟s time in France, his exposure to African and Caribbean intellectuals and the impact French colonialism had on them, his exchanges with French intellectuals of the left, all made him a trans-nationalist, broadening his worries beyond the binarism of race or the insularity of nation. Like Senghor, his universalism took difference, in particular, the Third World, as its commencing point. In reality,

Wright‟s views on the duty of the West after centuries of colonialism are remarkably prescient.

Fabre summarizes:

While proclaiming their pride in having liberated themselves, half a billion

human beings were asking their former masters to forswear their imperialist

144

and racist habits, (in Africa especially) and help them to industrialize.

In Black Power, Wright had advised Nkrumah to beware of Western aid,

but here, in The Color Curtain, he closes with an appeal for it. The task was

enormous, he warned, and the risk of disaster—when the religious, racial and

emotional forces of these nations were finally liberated—was very high (UQ 424).

Wright‟s experience of the significant power that the liberation of the Third World would generate and the possibility of disaster if the West did not assume the proper level of responsibility towards newly-independent or severely poor countries, is remarkable. We can only envision how he could have alerted us of the clashes the West currently encounters and responded to current geopolitical crises. More than ever before, Wright‟s insistence on universal concepts of humanity as potent enough to unite people across the globe, overriding variations of race, nation, tribe, religion or caste, are germane to today‟s struggles. Wright‟s transnationalism, the usefulness of his message of protest, has not yet receded.

Wright‟s exigency for transnationalism sound similar to Royce‟s emphasis on the principles of universality; he writes that

loyalty, taken in its universal meaning, is just as much a true good in the world

when my neighbor possesses it as when I possess it. If once I am wide-awake

enough to grasp this fact, I shall value my neighbor‟s loyalty just as highly as I do

my own. He indeed will be loyal to his cause, I to mine (Royce 248).

The problem, as the previous discussion has revealed, is that there is not room enough in the world for all the causes in the world to exist separately. Royce, however, points to altruism as the

145 way to improve the world‟s size, noting that “[c]harity, benevolence and- simplest of all- plain fair play are tendencies that are... to be ethically defined and deduced from [the principle of respecting the loyalty of others to their causes and thus being loyal to loyalty … Let this spirit of loyalty to loyalty become universal, and then wars will cease; for then the nations, without indeed lapsing into any merely international mass, will so respect each the loyalty of the others that aggression will come to seem inhuman” (Royce 251-252).

Having lived a life full of threats and worries, and seeing at Bandung men who have been around similar lives, Wright knows that the spirit of loyalty cannot be spread by reason and philosophical debate alone, but by risks employed as counterweights to risks. To make sure no one overlooks its value, Wright prints the critical formulation of this point in boldfaced type: “IN

SUM, BANDUNG WAS THE LAST CALL OF WESTERNIZED ASIANS TO THE MORAL

CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST” (CC 202). He, therefore, supports sort of self-interested philanthropy which conveys itself politically as an entrance of both the moral and the practical bankruptcy of power politics and the inevitability of international interdependence better known nowadays as transnationalism.

In the same vein, Sartre claims a utopia where the abolition of class divisions produces a truer and more naturally universal literature. Sartre speaks of „concrete universality‟ as the “sum total of men living in a given society,” (“What is Literature” 136) which explains the progressively interlocked universe of globalization and telecommunications, media and internet technology which we all inhabit today. Concrete universality‟s fullest expression would be in a more egalitarian, classless world, Sartre writes, in which the writer would naturally speak transnationally, since his passions would be similar to the ones from his fellows: “He would no

146 longer seek to soar above his times and bear witness to it before eternity, but, as his situation would be universal, he would express the hopes and anger of all men, and would thereby express himself completely” (“What is Literature” 138). In inciting the masses to assist in the name of transcendent rights and truths, enabling them to provide birth to a new, more egalitarian social order, and then in serving as the voice and conscience of that more just community,

Sartre‟s writer, and by extension Wright as his model, is here abstract, there concrete, and at all times the embodiment of transnationalism.

Nonetheless, Wright cautions that the interdependence he proposes, though necessary, will not be painless. He anticipates the crisis in competitiveness that has the U.S. in the 1990s worrying about its trade balance in relation to China and Japan, and that has many U.S. workers and labor leaders worried about competition from foreign (or immigrant) workers who work for far less (and in extreme instances are compelled to work for nothing). Wright states that

America‟s fear of “the „Yellow Peril‟ . . . was not primarily a racial matter, it was economic.

When the day comes that Asian and African raw materials are processed in Asia and Africa

[Wright did not anticipate the export-oriented manufacturing industries that lifted what became the Asian Tigers] by labor whose needs are not as inflated as those of Western laborers, the supremacy of the Western world, economic, cultural, and political, will have been broken once and for all on this earth and the de-Occidentalization of mankind will have definitively set in”

(CC 203). Today what Wright refers to is called the coming “Asian century,” and the de-

Occidentalization is revealed by men like Prime Minister Mahathir in statements of the existence of Asian ideals.

147

It is for such prescience that Wright must be recognized as a prophetic writer. Moreover, it is because of his prescience that his prescriptions for what can be called either altruism or illuminated self-interest must be seriously considered At the least, the rich will get absolutely no poorer, and more of the poor will do effectively. The evidence here can be identified in the US‟s gingerly treatment of China, which is trying to become the world‟s biggest market, despite U.S. condemnation of Beijing‟s human rights record and business procedures:

To have an ordered, rational world in which we all can share, I suppose

that the average white Westerner will have to accept [that the world is

destined to be de-Occidentalized], either he will have to accept it or he

will have to seek for ways and means of resubjugating these newly freed

millions … If he does accept it, he will also have to accept, for an

unspecified length of time, a much lower standard of living, for that is

what a de-Occidentalization of present-day mankind will bring about. (CC 203)

Where Wright strikes closer to the mark is in his appeal to the West not only to be devoted to its own ideals of independence, but to its own need to minimize its risks, to reap the wages of altruism rather than the wages of worry and destructive war:

It is far preferable that the Western world willingly aid in the creation of

Jack London‟s „Yellow Peril‟ in terms of Asians‟ and Africans‟ processing

of their own raw materials ... Industrialized Asia and Africa would be rational

areas that could be dealt with; even the aims, then, of intercontinental wars

would be clear; the military objectives of both sides understandable. But to

wage war against racial and religious emotion is ultimately meaningless

148

and impossible. (CC 216-217)

Wright‟s take on the “one world” idea undoubtedly has to do with generating the world a single conceptual space, rationalized for industrial manufacturing and, somewhat self-contradictorily, rational bloodshed. For him, this reduces the potential risk of war or, if war breaks out, of total war. He overlooks, for useful reasons, apparent and enormous counterexamples. World Wars I and II, both of them conflicted between industrialized, “rational” countries that nonetheless witnessed unparalleled death and destruction.

The external element of one‟s social income is essential to one‟s life chances. The driving force of independence movements and the underlying theme at Bandung is the desire to raise social income. Chou En-Lai trades, Wright tells us, in the fact that he is dealing with outcasts- men and representatives of men whose social earnings have long been negative. Sukarno, for instance, recollects that during his early years as a political activist, Indonesians were still “a humiliated race treated like the scum of the earth by our captors … we were even prevented from mouthing the term „Indonesia.‟ It happened that once, in the heat of a speech, „Indonesia‟ came out of my mouth. „Stop … stop...,‟ the police ordered. And the meeting was instantly broken up”

(Soekarno and Adams 63). Memories of such humiliation and the inevitable lingering resentment are, according to Wright, the keys Chou En-lai presses as he plays out his speech. “It cost him nothing,” Wright observes, to assume an altruistic stance and “speak words of compassion. He offered no programs of industrialization, no long-term loans, no mutual defense pacts. To the nations under a sense of inferiority, he tried to cement ties of kinship.” (CC l59). The economic undercurrent of The Color Curtain comes forth clearly when Wright expresses that Chou‟s compassion costs him nothing. Considerably, the expenses Chou might have received, to support

149 industrialization plans or defense pacts, decrease national risks of poverty and unrest in the case of industrialization and financial loans, and of military risks in the case of security pacts.

However, they do not in themselves produce a feeling of community and loyalty. Kinship, alternatively, has been exposed by biologists as an essential source of altruistic works. If as the

Chinese saying goes, “a journey of ten thousand miles begins with the first step,” (Quoted in

Koch 31). Chou is sure-footed. In calling for “mutual understanding and respect, mutual sympathy and support, instead of mutual suspicion and fear, mutual exclusion, and antagonism,”

Chou explains a philanthropic model of creating world relationships. This philanthropy is to be based on a kinship born of the “sufferings and calamities under colonialism” (CC 159).

Colonialism, as the comments on it quoted earlier indicate, shaped the very desires of those it subjugated, and shaped, along with the desires, the relationships, and, with the relationships, the evolution of the feeling of kinship. Offering compassion and understanding, Chou is practicing philanthropy as risk management is the basis of society.

This is where Wright‟s focus on expenses comes in. Willingness to bear costs is the acid test of philanthropy and, for Wright, of truthfulness. Wright, always aiming for objectivity, pays

Chou what for him is almost the maximum compliment. Chou, Wright wraps up, is “rational,” and notes that the minimal costs Chou does incur are taken on rationally, in the spirit of risk management:

More than ten million Chinese of dual nationality resided in many Asian

countries and they constituted a problem. It was here that Chou-En-lai

made his smartest move and actually surrendered substantial concessions

to his neighbor nations; he announced that he was signing a treaty with

150

Indonesia, granting the minority of two million Chinese living in Indonesia

the right to choose their nationality … Brother Chou was most anxious to join

this Asian-African church and was willing to pay for his membership.

He stated that other Asian nations could avail themselves of similar

treaty arrangements. It was a master stroke, and whatever misgiving

existed not only melted into a passive acceptance of Red China,

but into a kind of grudging admiration of Chou‟s good will. (CC 160)

To settle down the tie of Chinese nationality, Chou starts to develop a transnational kinship founded on pragmatism. That is to say, he generates a market for kinship, in which loyalty determined by “sufferings and calamities under colonialism” becomes the commodity to be traded in return for the shelving of regional divisions. He triggers what is, in a way, a tremendous blood brother ritual.

Wright‟s smart coinage, the “Asian-African church” (CC 160), provides both Bandung‟s revivalist spirit and its “sacred drama.” Here common oppression replaces blood and culture with kinships, just as Wright asserts it does in The Color Curtain. And once kinship is founded, it functions as it constantly does, obligating a person to shelter one‟s relatives and to guard them against threat. Even at the expense of taking risks, Chou, with intelligent actions and master strokes, gains a grudging appreciation for a good will. Wright suggests that in international relationships what matters in the short run and perhaps the long term too is firm actions and definite goals. When a promise is offered, a greater key to whether it will be approved is often its conformity to certain modality of a promise (“I promise. ... I swea r... I will never ... I will always ... ”) instead of the possibility that it will be achieved.

151

Chou, whose delegation was denounced in several speeches, used the conference‟s stated objective of oneness to stay away from being driven into furious encounters. “There is no need to trumpet one‟s ideology or the differences between us,” he said. “We are here to seek a community of views, not to raise points of difference … Most of the countries of Asia and Africa have suffered from colonialism … If we seek common ground to remove the misery imposed upon us, it will be easy for us to understand each other, to help each other”(Suyin 245).

Combined with such words, the arrangement regarding the international Chinese allayed worries of a China-leadership mentality among overseas Chinese by stating that the overseas Chinese have full freedom and are free to throw their lot along with the newly-independent countries to which they or their forefathers have immigrated. At this level, the blood-brother ceremony takes on the implications of an organized mutual marriage to reinforce a peace agreement.

Hence Chou En-Iai, by promising to behave, had built a bridgehead

that had found foundations not only in Asia but extended even into

tribal black Africa… Hitherto international Communists had not

been successful at all in Africa, where a tribal mass. wrapped in

poetic dreams, had defied their efforts at ideological indoctrination. (CC 162)

In view of the obstacle of the spread of Communism faced in Africa, it could be declared that risks management is an effort to suit threat and volatility into a pattern of uniformity of some kind. Wright praises Chou for stating the treaty that formalizes this initiative and creates a model of cooperation among all of the countries present. Goodwill and philanthropy are in a sense constructed within the framework of such arrangements. Where such a structure prevails, altruism requires not be passionately felt to be beneficial and appropriate. The political

152 compensation the delegates would obtain by building a coalition, however fragile, at Bandung was higher than the political payment they could anticipate by staying aloof. Wright, at the end of The Color Curtain, warns against the risks the West takes by not engaging in an ethical manner with the nations at the conference. He warns that the prevailing Cold War attitudes and modes of relating to the Third World are, in fact, destructive. He explains that if the First World insists on its own ways, it will be fighting against a group that will unify around a common ground and that would rather die than be defeated (CC 217-8). This evaluation is founded on the image he developed in Black Power of Africa inspired by its feeling that it contains the Truth.

In The Color Curtain, however, one can take a glance at another chance for Wright‟s journey to reflect his emerging vision. After listening to the opening speeches at the conference and conducting a number of interviews, Wright challenges to comprehend what he has experienced. Though mesmerized to view leaders of the Asian and African nations meeting to discuss strategies without the leadership of the Western World at hand, he is troubled by the talk of race and religion that predominates. Still at this moment, in lieu of simply rejecting the position being taken by the speakers, Wright expresses the necessity to take these ideas seriously.

At the conclusion of the text, as he demands the West to interact with these countries, he reiterates the need for the West to get involved with them as equivalent partners in conversation, rather than as the bearers of truth.

Despite his own uncertainty about the ways in which they are creating their arguments he indicates that engaging them is the way forward, is the third way beyond the dialectic between the first two worlds that might surpass the fixed three-world map and begin a new set of worldwide relations through which every part of the world will be incorporated into a

153 multinational body rather than seeking to be subsumed into one of the existing paradigms. “New terms,” he says, “will have to be found, terms that will fit the nature of the human material involved” (CC 220). He even indicates their own delicate relations at the conference as a model:

“If Asians and Africans can sink their national and religious differences for what they feel to be a common defense of their vital interests, as they did at Bandung, then the same process of unity can serve for other ends” (CC 220).

Wright‟s transnational perspective echoes Gilroy‟s vision of planetary humanity. He ends

Against Race with the following internationally valued universals: “Our challenge should now be to bring even more powerful visions of planetary humanity from the future into the present and to reconnect them with democratic and cosmopolitan traditions that have been all but expunged from today‟s black political imaginary” (356). Maintaining faith is a permutation of identical utopian, faith-filled search for hope. Group unity and individual freedom are the matters of argument. Gilroy states the dilemma as a “call for the institution of an anti-colonial and nonracial universalism” in the social order of postmodern society (Against Race 71). Accordingly, racism as a principle continuously requires a more informed explanation of the subsequent political dynamics affecting the social and political behavior of the culture at large.

Wright was ready to accept this transnational possibility and steps past his deep-seated beliefs to suspend judgment and assess the ideas of others seriously with which he engages.

Wright heads to the Bandung Conference thinking he will act as a translator between the intellectuals and politicians at the meeting. On the one hand, he considers that his status as a black man not only can assist him identify the individuals he will interview but also may allow them to divulge heart‟s contents to him. He believes they will observe in him an ally, a comrade.

154

However, once he arrives in Bandung and watches the conference unfolding, he starts entirely to grasp a distinction between himself and those he has come to write about:

Well, what I heard from the lips of many Asians startled me, reduced

my strictures to the status of a “family quarrel.” . . . I found that many

Asians hated the West with an absoluteness that no American Negro

could ever muster. The American Negro‟s reactions were limited, partial,

centered as they were, upon specific complaints; he rarely ever criticized

or condemned the conditions of life about him as a whole … Once his

particular grievances were redressed, the Negro reverted to a normal Western

outlook. The Asian, however, had been taken from his own culture before he

had embraced or had pretended to embrace Western culture; he had, therefore,

a feeling of distance, of perspective, of objectivity toward the West which

tempered his most intimate experiences of the West. (CC 25-6)

Wright understands that his connection to the West is differently recognized and represented back to him by those he interviews. Therefore, the connection he thought to occur between himself and his interviewees differs from what he had previously thought. Additionally, he encounters the reality that his identity, his vision of himself as a critic of the West, could be entirely different from what he had previously imagined. What Wright must recognize here is that the self is not a distinct, bounded location on the map. It is a set of associations to numerous categories regularly subject to reconfiguration as time goes by or one encounters others. Wright appears to understand that for his travel to be educational, he must not only compare himself to

155 the other he engages, but also keep track of the way he is received and the views the other expressess.

When he contemplates this process, his findings do more to build up the political knowledge he is in search of. In such cases, Wright evolves sensitivity to the context that the religious and racial feelings he witnesses have emerged. He becomes more cognizant of the methods in which material circumstances that form the lives of individuals who happen to be colonized in Asia and Africa might be very different from situations in other places, even those in which oppression prevails. He says that even with his need to achieve this, these identities are difficult to wish away; he runs into the limitations of his own rational universalism , uncharacteristically declaring at one point that at times “[l]ogic cannot solve problems whose solutions come not by thinking but by living” (CC 55). While his universal humanist views would typically have him hesitate at thinking about the significance of identity to advancement of a politics, he works hard to grasp the speakers entirely at the conference who require just that.

Hence Wright, at the conclusion of the Bandung book, confronts round to the West and demands that it support the tragic elite expand the “shaky and delicate” foundation of the secular rationalism they had imbibed with the poisonous “racial shame” that helped create the “negative unity” (CC 175),the unity in opposition to the West at Bandung. “If Asians and Africans can sink their national and religious differences for what they feel to be a common defense of their vital interests, as they did at Bandung,” Wright declares,

then that same process of unity can serve for other ends, for rapid

industrialization of the lives of the people of Asia and Africa.. . . Unless the

Western world can meet the challenge of the miraculous unity of Bandung openly

156

and selflessly, it faces an Asian-African attempt at pulling itself out of its own

mire under the guidance of Mr. Chou En-lai and his drastic theories and practices

of endless secular sacrifices. (CC 220)

Wright‟s cry is a cry for altruismfor a West that, out of commitment to its greatest principles and away from self-interest in its competition with a Communist bloc that for Wright Chou embodies works to demonstrate that, indeed, altruism is more effective than violence, and that transnational historiography should be constructed on getting independence, rather than pushing conformity to a master plan. Wright, in the end, had himself proved the value of the transnational historiography. He took a library card handed him by a racist man experiencing a mild bout of benevolence, and made the card the basis of one of the canniest and most provocative bodies of knowledge concerning the world‟s warring historiographies that we have acquired.

This conclusion varies substantially from the one in Black Power, where Wright cautions

Kwame Nkrumah of Western insincerity. In that book he motivates Nkrumah to seek out his own paths, his own values, because as a man of African ancestry raised in the East, Wright could hardly “recommend with good faith the agitated doctrines and promises of the West” (BP 345).

However, Wright was clearly afflicted by the poverty that encircled him, which had haunted him in Ghana and which he knew thrived throughout the Third World. He started to acknowledge that the psychological wound left by colonialism ran so deep that the non-white people of the world would diminish further, and at a significantly faster pace, unless the West featured enormous amounts of capital and support.

Even though Wright stayed a staunch critic of the West, he had come to notice the worth of Western technology, cause and effect logic, and a powerful work mentality. Race and religion

157 might have revealed themselves into an emotional nationalism, but they remained “two of the most irrational forces in human nature” (CC 140). As Wright surmises, “today, as never before, it can be seen that the future of national cultures will reside in the willingness of nations to take up modern ideas and live out their logic” (CC 199). However only through Western assistance could all countries benefit from the fruits of modernism. “Bandung was the last call of westernized Asians to the moral conscience of the West!” (CC 202), Wright exclaims. If the

West declined this request, Chou En-lai lurked there, “waiting, patient, with no record of racial practices behind him ... [and] he will listen” (CC 202).

Though The Color Curtain grouped into the genre of travel journalism and often depends on Wright's emotional responses to activities surrounding him, the book consists of a solemn caution which results in the future of almost all nations. It is the artist in Wright finds its most substantial expression:

I felt while at Bandung that the was about to undergo

one of the most severe tests in its long and glorious history. Alien

pressures and structures of thought and feeling will be brought to

bear upon this our mother tongue and we shall be hearing some strange

and twisted expression . . . But this is all to the good; a language is

useless unless it can be used for the vital purposes of life, and to use a

language in new situations is, inevitably, to change it. (CC 200)

Perhaps the image Wright had described for the past twenty years as an innovative battling for social and political adjustments had taken on a different meaning. As John Reilly clarifies,

Wright did not want to participate in intellectual discussions about Western nationalism when the

158 people were starving; nor could he identify with the struggle between the US and USSR, two superpowers whose social systems were couched in competition and industrialism. Having been unsuccessful miserably at his first exile novel, Wright wanted a new route, a new voice, “a compelling subject to restore optimism of will, the means to project confidently his self-created identity of intellectual, and a literary form that would empower him to speak ... with the force of an agent of contemporary history” (Reilly, “Non-fiction” 510). Wright uncovered hope and a new intellectual awareness in the developing countries of the Third World.

Like other intellectuals before him, he moved to the developing countries when his philosophical views no longer applied to the West. In the 1903 publication, The Souls of Black

Folk, the revolutionary author, African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois stressed:

“the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (Souls 1). Du Bois wrote these words at the beginning of the twentieth century with anxiety and hope. His anxiety would have originated from a concern that the dilemma of racism—such as all of its concomitant resources and effects—would go unaddressed in the century ahead, as it had remained mainly unresolved in the one prior. However, Wright endeavors to address these colonial, racial, religious and national issues which have kept several developing countries moving backward.

The emerging nation of Ghana provided him his first new intellectual stimulus. In Black Power, he establishes the general theme that would dominate the rest of his nonfiction: colonial powers tyrannize their captives, often inflicting emotional wounds which take centuries to heal. As in so many of his other works, the central focus of Black Power had been humanization, freedom, the escape from both the external and internal forces which prevented self-determination and hindered modernization. Wright argues that the masses had to break from tribal traditions as well

159 as the restrictive confines of their colonial oppressors in order to gain complete independence.

Only then could they thrust headlong into the latter half of the twentieth century.

In The Color Curtain, Wright can take the ideas introduced in Black Power and apply them on a grander, more global scale. He steps “out onto the stage of the whole world” (Reilly,

“Non-fiction” 519) through attacking Western imperialism and communist hostility along with warning of the serious consequences if the Third World were not permitted its independence and self-respect. In The Color Curtain Wright tries to reconsider the tensions between East and West, to assist the world re-define honor, freedom, and security in order to ensure person a greater and more purposeful sense of success and accomplishment.

To aid in these endeavors, Wright projects his “autobiographical will into history” (Reilly

Non-fiction 518). He had carried out this earlier in Black Power when he had informed Nkrumah to “force march his people into the twentieth century” (Reilly, “Non-fiction” 518). By the end of

The Color Curtain, Wright describes the necessity of involvement to be able to form reality.

Surprised by a white American liberal‟s reluctance to have his country interfere in order to enhance circumstances in the Third world, Wright comments: “Man, Civilization is built upon the right to interfere. We start interfering with a baby as it is born. Education is interference. I think you have a right to interfere if you feel that the assumptions of your interference are sound”

(CC 211). As a result, Wright believes that America and her European allies must accept the consequences of their past actions and intervene technologically and industrially without any underhanded, political motives.

And they must intervene quickly, Wright argues, “or else the tenuous Asian-African secular, rational attitudes [represented by the elite who, for the most part, were educated in the

160

West] will become flooded, drowned in irrational tides of racial and religious passions” (CC

219). The tone of The Color Curtain is one of certainty and forcefulness. As Reilly writes, the control demonstrated in Wright's report was obvious “in the records of conversations that took place once Wright reached Indonesia; without reference to need for translation, interpretation or editing, the statements “by native Indonesians [are] always subordinate to Wright's questions”

(Reilly, “Non-fiction” 513). The hook does not pretend to be, as Gunnar Myrdal points out in the forward to The Color Curtain, “heavily documented analysis of the Bandung Conference and of the forces of world history in the making which converged there” (CC 7). Rather, it is “Richard

Wright telling us what he, a visiting stranger and a good reporter, heard and saw there, and what he himself thought and felt” (CC l). Thus, the true subject of The Color Curtain becomes the

“intellect of Richard Wright” (Reilly “Non-fiction” 513). As in Black Power and Pagan Spain,

The Color Curtain has turned into a forum in which Wright channels not only his frustrations but the international humanism he had been creating since his exile to Paris a decade earlier; he discovered such a medium in his report of the Bandung Conference.

Just as Black Power, the stasis he accomplished in Bandung and The Color Curtain was momentary. There is no question that he could purge some of the restlessness that had been gnawing at him for years. However, as Addison Gayle clearly shows, in writing The Color

Curtain Wright once again “would walk the middle path … He would censure the West and praise it at the same time. He would suggest ways that the Third World might be saved from being devoured by the Communists. During the first years of his exile, he had attacked the evils of American hegemony as offered via the Marshall Plan; now this same hegemony was viewed as a possible good” (Gayle 258). To put it differently, Bandung did not liberate Wright ultimately, did not provide any more security or sense of identity than his claim that the one

161 tangible factor in his favor was his being “colored” like every Asian and African representative at the conference. In a speech at the Congress of Black Artists and Intellectuals in Paris immediately after his return from Bandung, Wright explains himself, somewhat propitiously, “as at once a Westerner and a Black, one who is thereby privileged to see “both worlds from another, and third, point of view” (Reilly, “Non-fiction” 511). This added insight however, casts Wright further onto the road of the lonely intellectual, existing precariously, like “the Westernized and tragic elite of Asia, Africa, and the West Indies ... on the cliff-like margins of many cultures”

(CC 1). The Transnational community production and building in Richard Wright‟s The Color

Curtain makes a contribution to ongoing arguments within the fields of postcolonial literature and globalization studies by evaluating the changes in political believed fundamental literary writing produced in since the American centennial. In dealing with these concerns, The Color

Curtain highlights that the rise of a globalizing mentality has progressively encouraged authors to look toward transnational viewpoint. Through reading The Color Curtain, one finds it easy to delineate the adjustments in Wright‟s report on Bandung from racial and cultural nationalism through the debates of the culture wars and identity to transnational wider perspective.

Wright‟s theory and practice of transnational community in The Color Curtain make a contribution to ongoing arguments within the fields of postcolonial literature and globalization studies. Wright evaluates the changes in politically believed fundamental literary writings produced since the American centennial. In dealing with these concerns, The Color Curtain highlights that the rise of a globalizing mentality has progressively encouraged authors to look toward transnational viewpoint. The Color Curtain enables us to delineate the adjustments in

Wright‟s report on Bandung from racial and cultural nationalism through the debates of the culture wars and identity to transnational wider perspective.

162

While the literary works that led the way for Wright‟s transnational worldview start with

Black Power and even might go back to “Blueprint,” Wright‟s The Color Curtain explores the transnational connections that Wright‟s international worldview in American expatriate literature. African American identification limits these subjects inside double national affinity. A result of the reminiscences of racial discrimination, Wright struggles to identify himself with his home country. Similarly, Wright cannot nationally and culturally identify with Africa because he felt alienated when visiting Ghana and questioned his affinity with the tribal culture. For that reason, Wright has had to challenge his ethnic and national connection. Making use of this identification, he investigates the restrictions of racial and national affinities to the transnational connections. The Adjustments in Wright‟s perspective in The Color Curtain is not just associated with the political conference from different countries in the Third World. Rather, modifications in Wright‟s approach to racial and national issues are also related to changing his subjective mentality, in which the self becomes progressively open, questioning the oppositional modes of running politics.

Emphasizing national and racial identities has paralyzed Wright‟s sense of belonging. He viewed himself as an outsider in his home country and the country that his ancestors belong to.

Transnational connections have broadened Wright‟s way of thinking and interacting with the world around him. Only when Wright sets out to think transnationally concentrating on frequent optimistic factor that might help emerging countries to prosper, does he realize the restrictions of basing his standpoint upon national and racial conceptions of identity. Wright‟s analysis of race and nationality helps him reunite to a larger global community and various ethnic minority communities in the search for social justice.

163

Wright was a Western and genuinely American intellectual, regardless of his outsider status as African American, and he recognized the extent of both identifications only when confronted with the African/Asian Other. Despite his continued affiliation with American and

Western culture, however, Wright was thinking about larger, transnational and transracial political and thought that he could always benefit from encounters with Others. The somewhat earlier Black Power and The Color Curtain show, despite limitations and problems, awareness toward new understandings and a move toward transnationalism. Such international perspective incorporates a continuous renegotiation of cultural, racial and national prejudices.

164

Chapter Three

Reviving the Spanish Dream for Freedom: Civilizations Meeting in the Ghetto of

Enlightenment

I. Wright’s Odyssey from America to Africa, Asia, and Europe

Transnationalism is the surpassing of the borders and barriers of nation, race, and culture. Colonialism is important in relation to transnationalism because it creates borders, aggravates tension among people of the same nation, and manipulates the colonized nation.

Therefore, colonialism is viewed as a barrier that hinders human progress and interaction.

Colonialism is like dictatorship since both are barriers in front of transnationalism. While the former manipulates people and keeps them trapped with myths and superstitions, the latter uses ideologies to ensure subjugation of community. For that reason Wright was against both. He fights against the West as colonizers and against dictatorship. However, he is for working hand in hand with the West. Wright functions as a transnational agent; he is the intellectual who is able to move from state of persecution to an advocate of liberation and equality among humans with the aim of creating more interaction, productivity among humans, and equal access to resources.

Therefore, barriers in Wright‟s transnational worldview are his previous racial experience under Jim Crow, colonialism, religion, and national borders. Wright is calling for transcending the barriers. However, he is susceptible to accept a new way of looking at life; he found in his

165 travel narratives a means of looking at the world as a united whole. It was through such an outlook that the revolutionary Wright, in the process of his inner movement reached the final dialectics of mind and the holistic thinking.

In Black Power and The Color Curtain, Wright calls the West to take a humanitarian and philanthropic role to develop the Third World countries. In Pagan Spain, he points out the need for the West to develop and overcome social and political corruption. Pagan Spain is not primarily political or religious; a deeper reading of the text can reveal that it is against corruption and persecution more than anything else. These defects in Spanish community shed light on some themes that Wright has already discussed at Bandung but not in a Third World country.

Rather, this corruption is in a Western country and, thus, makes Wright‟s call against it stronger than it was before. He is addressing the people in power and the Spanish people to change the traditional corruption that will help liberate people from the religious and political hegemony.

Again, Wright emphasizes his transnational role and involves undermining the principles of dictatorship in a human motive.

Moreover, in Pagan Spain, Wright concludes that oppression and inequality are global issues that should be dealt with at the national and international levels. He reiterates what he proposes in his previous works Black Power and The Color Curtain. His transnational endeavor is a process that starts from the top down as he appealed to the West to take a central role in developing the Third-World countries. Similarly, he believes that a corrupt head of a nation can lead to malfunctioning religious, social and educational institutions. In Spain, Franco‟s regime was corrupt and has led to political and social disintegration. Wright‟s sensitive and broad worldview compels him to advocates the rights of all people regardless of their color, race, and

166 national affiliation; this dimension of Wright‟s thinking supports his transnational endeavors to create a more peaceful and harmonious world. Though he does not directly address Franco‟s regime in Spain, Wright realizes that the head of the nation should take part in developing the country and promoting its inhabitants‟ well-being. And as part of the West, democracy should spread to Spain following the example of the other Western countries.

The original title of Pagan Spain was Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past in parallel with The Color curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. The original title was also remindful of his autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (Fabre, UQ 413).

At this point in his life, Wright had begun to evaluate his own career in the context of the

American and global literary tradition. The subtitle “a Journey into the Past” suggests a regressive viewpoint in Wright‟s writing career. In the prologue of Pagan Spain, he uses a segment from Carl Sandburg‟s 1918 poem “Prairie” to hint at the futility of being trapped to the past: “I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down” (PS

Prologue). Even though Wright did not quote the rest of the poem, it reinforces the towering emblem of his optimistic belief that the future will be shining: “I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: Tomorrow is a day” (qtd. in N. Callahan 86). In the same fashion, the new title of Pagan Spain, which came out in 1957, emphasizes Wright‟s progressive perspective of the world and includes suggestions to move the Spaniards forward.

In line with the connotations of the title Pagan Spain, an explanation of Sartre and

Beauvoir‟s existential theory can be helpful to understand Wright‟s intention. For Sartre and

Beauvoir, at the heart of being human is nothingness. Nothingness, according to Sartre, “does not itself have Being, yet it is supported by Being. It comes into the world by the recoil from fullness

167 of self-contained Being which allows consciousness to exist as such” (Sartre, Being and

Nothingness 804). To exist means to stand out to be distant from one‟s being. It means that “first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself [or herself]” (Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions 15). A thing, however, is confined to “its pure facticity” (Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity 31). So the concrete details that determine our existence can expand according to the change of environment and the limitations that surround that existence. In other words, the center of our personality is flexible based on the concrete details that surround a human being. This concept goes against an essentialist view of the world.

Relevant here is Hakutani‟s understanding that “[t]he lack of center and the recognition of gaps and oppositions that characterize the postmodern text suggest that postmodernists are bent upon abolishing marginality and extending referentiality in their text (Cross-Cultural Visions

West meets East xvi). Hakutani continues, “their visions and dialogues have come to include relations not only between East and West, Old and New, but also between the First, Second and

Third Worlds within as well as across national cultures” (Cross-Cultural Visions West meets

East xvi). Therefore, as part of his transnational trilogy that calls for a transnational and transracial worldview, Wright‟s Pagan Spain was deemed as a challenge to the essentialist mainstream African-American literary traditions. As we have seen, the process of getting black people to see themselves as a mere plenitude was through the deployment of an essentialist discourse designed to arrest questions of agency, freedom, subjectivity and consciousness. The more effective the essentialist logic, the more black people were unable to see themselves as historical agents capable of moving toward a wide open prospect of possibilities.

168

In Pagan Spain, Wright acquired a transnational view of the universal world in its diversity. He offered profound description and analysis of “the fiestas, flamencos, bullfights, the feeling of the national country, and the warmth of the people and the incredible poverty”

(Learned 185). Incapable of making that link with his African American community in his works of fiction, Wright finds himself an accepted member of every grouped community in the world.

Pagan Spain presents an accomplishment that permits him to investigate locations of turmoil outside the limits of his national, cultural and racial background. Throughout Pagan Spain, the reader is more often encouraged to recollect the Wright of Mississippi than the Wright of New

York, Chicago, or Paris. This observation is important because it illustrates the “emotional landscape of Mississippi.” But more considerably, it underscores the difference between

Wright‟s account of Spain and that of any other American writer. Pagan Spain came out to signal a departure from Wright‟s earlier non-fiction and from Black Power and The Color

Curtain that focused on the non-Western world, African and Asian cultures, whereas Pagan

Spain is mainly concerned with a Western culture narrated by an American (Kiuchi and

Hakutani, Documented Chronology 200-1). As crucial perhaps is Wright‟s motivation to display to his critics that even though he no longer lived in the United States, he could still write skillfully and sensitively about human suffering. The journey to Spain might have uncovered how slavery had severed him from the traditions of his ancestral past. It also reveals how closely it aligns him with his American and global origins and his special role in its literary history.

Wright‟s transnational and humanist impulse is clear through the dedication of the book to Alva and Gunnar Myrdal “whose compassionate hearts have long brooded upon the degradation of human life in Spain” (PS dedication). He would live in Paris and write about Spain, the Gold

Coast, or Indonesia but his subjects and vision were once rooted in American imagination.

169

Apparently, Wright‟s travel writing foregrounds the relevance of his Protestant childhood years given that he draws attentions to his Western standpoint as no time before. He writes:

“Long before I had the freedom to choose, I was molded a Westerner. It began in childhood. And the process continues,” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 81). Relatedly, in Pagan Spain, he focuses on his “deep non-Catholicness, [his] undeniable and inescapable Protestant background and conditioning” (PS 195). Wright describes such a scheduled program for the Gold Coast and by implication, Africa by and large. He claims a secularized type of a disciplined rationality. His rationalism and secularism are embodied by ideal leaders whom he refers to as the “tragic elite”

(“Tradition and Industrialization” 100). As reported by Wright, men such as Nkrumah of the

Gold Coast and Nehru of India are “the FREEST MEN IN ALL THE WORLD TODAY. They stand poised, nervous, straining at the leash, ready to go, with no weight of the dead past clouding their minds, no fears of foolish customs benumbing their consciousness, eager to build industrial civilizations” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 97). Wright‟s standpoint of how this tragic elite would handle native tradition varied, but there seem to be two key versions of the process: rational building of civilization and clearing minds from old customs.

Despite its innovative worth and the stimulating outcome it had on Wright, Pagan Spain received varying reviews. As would be envisioned, the Catholic press attacked it from all perspectives. Certain leftist publications criticized the book for dedicating excessive attention to religious issues and not enough to the daily battles against the Franco regime. Roi Ottley , writing for the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, echoed the criticism that were leveled against Wright since he had preferred exile in 1947: “I am an admirer of Wright's novels, but I do not think he has the talents of the skilled reporter, nor indeed has the developed and subtle understanding necessary accurately to report the social and cultural nuances of the Spanish

170 people ... This distinguished writer‟s gifts and insights as a novelist might be better served in reporting such dramas as now unfold in Montgomery, Tallahassee, and Clinton, Tennessee. They are tailor made for his talents” (Reilly, Critical Reception 298). Ottley as well as many others did not get the full picture that Wright had no intention of going back. He no longer needed the small, rural towns outside Jackson to denounce oppression.

One instance of deprivation recollected another. Although the tiny robed figures in the shop windows of Seville which Wright saw near the last part of his journey “gave [him] a creepy feeling, for these objects reminded [him] of the Ku Klux Klan of the Old American South” (PS

233), they also manifested the religious persecution he observed during his travels through

Spain. Wright considered himself an appropriate and astute reporter because he transcended viewing the world in black and white. Oppression was a global problem, and it had to be exposed on all corners of the planet if it were to be arrested and concealed. Hence, before he had even finished traveling in Spain, Wright started preparing for his next journey to Bandung. Despite further bouts with flight and alienation, he continued his sharp attack and urgent appeal in his important book of nonfiction, The Color Curtain.

Despite Addison Gayle‟s remark that Wright‟s reactions to Spain were extremely personal (250), Margaret Walker contended that Wright‟s Marxist affiliation was responsible for the anti-Catholic bias in Pagan Spain. In both models Wright is unquestionably committed to modernity, a fact which Gilroy elides in The Black Atlantic‟s “claims for the value of his travel books” (150). In fact, Gilroy does not discuss Pagan Spain in any detail at all. Gilroy influenced critics who have also downplayed Wright‟s later works and his commitment to an intercontinental state of in-betweenness. However, Mary Louise Pratt opposes Wright to neo-

171 imperial “seeing-men” such as Paul Theroux, who supported colonial power, arguing that Wright made a more relational, transcultural traveling figure (220). Over and above, Walker writes about

Wright‟s Pagan Spain picturing it as an “odyssey”:

His intellectual odyssey, like his physical journeys, took him to four

continents in search of freedom and a country where he might find a

common ground of humanity. Always and everywhere the influence and the

presence of the United States southland went with him. It was the

yardstick by which he measured French Liberty, Equality, and

Fraternity, the measure he took of the African personality, the Asian

scene at Bandung, the problems of Pagan Spain, and the backdrop for

Argentinian . (316)

Wright‟s racial past experiences of his childhood years stimulated him through his life. He made trips, physical and mental, looking for the meaning of such experience, examining it with those who had the same type of experience. Larry Neal, an African American critic, explains this quest of Wright and says the following about Wright‟s final years which

were spent explaining the psychology of the oppressed

throughout the third world … His later writings are indeed his

attempt to understand his own racial dilemma by placing it in

an international context, thus linking it to the general affects of

colonialism on the psychology of the oppressed. (652)

172

Wright‟s journeys are, in reality, his effort to identify his contradictions and double consciousness. Out of some contradictions, like his being an outsider, he acquires a distinct power, and his writings flourished on them. Nonetheless, he cannot deal with his ambivalence about individual versatility and responsibility toward the collective, concerning the function of progressive ideals within the time of the colonized and his undermining that part and attempting to fulfill deficiency of ideology with transcendental mores also tinged his writings with mystification and diverted him from the real challenges. As he altered his target from the racial viewpoint to a worldwide colonial and neo-colonial situation, he also made an effort to convert his individual knowledge into a global experience of humankind. All at once, he was thrown off his social standpoint and lost sight of the immediate, concrete challenges that he so firmly set up in his early writings.

Having said that, Wright, as an author of an overpowered people, was well aware of his duties and without abandoning the inquiry into race relationship, entered probably the most essential issues of the current century— imperialism and neo-colonialism. Fabre declares that

Wright‟s efforts to comment on Spain is valuable as he “was not in fashion, and the American public probably did not think that a black man without religion had the right to dissect and judge the decadence of a white Christian nation” (UQ 414-15). Although his works could have several defects, yet the sole fact that Wright turned out to be enthusiastic about the workings of neo- colonialism and the subtle class conflict in the Third World and revealed the plight of African-

Americans with that of the Third World countries and Spain, illustrates his transnationalism and farsightedness. As an author, he places himself within the ranking of those who dedicate themselves truly but in an uncertain way to the causes of the oppressed beyond the limitations of race and nation. As a black person he experienced tyranny.

173

While Wright‟s vision is splendid and has arguably a travel consideration, it is unquestionably transnational and has immediate pertinence for his increasing worldview.

Wright‟s support of rationality, secularism, and education is not stressed enough in contemporary literary analysis. Wright proposes a sincerely race-free model of humanity, as Pagan Spain suggests that Spain‟s peripheral position in the world system is a result of Spaniards‟ absence of access to modern rationalism. To put it differently, Wright‟s treatment of Spain parallels his treatment of Africa and points to the same fundamental debate: spatially energized, hybrid transnationalism can only be achieved by someone who has gone through an intensive socialization process that stresses a secular mentality, self-discipline, and critical distance.

According to Dennis Evans, Wright‟s travel writings are “integral parts of the Wright autobiographical canon” and that Wright “goes outside of his homeland, his land, in search of himself” (166). For this reason, although Wright‟s status as a privileged traveler implicated him in the American-led world system and the worldwide diaspora of middle-class expatriate writers, he redeems himself by foregrounding the sociological elements that created his empowerment.

Wright‟s view of the expansion of this socialization process is a sign of his transnational humanist perspective, and his travel writing offers to resist the significant individualism of the transnational frontier.

During this crucial moment, Wright is compelled to think about critical aspects of the

Spanish life. The very idea of Spain suggests to him what it means to tour its scenery and connect with the people. Wright points out that his reluctance does not originate from anxiety about Spain„s totalitarian regime headed by General Franco. He already encountered such totalitarianism while in the “absolutistic racist regime in Mississippi” (PS 1). Without doubt, one can even suppose that his journey in Spain could be freer compared to the experience of traveling

174 as a black man in the U.S. during that time, mainly in the South. The reason Spain is an important stop and of significant value to Wright is more than the similarity that it bears to his early racial experience in the South: “The fate of Spain had hurt me, had haunted me ... An uneasy question kept floating in my mind: How did one live after the death of the hope for freedom? (PS 2). Even with his concerns, Wright reconciles himself to his journey and turns the car toward Pyrenees that “mark the termination of Europe and the beginning of Africa” (PS 2).

In the travel account of Spain, Wright offers a stimulating illustration of an inquisitive “traveler, belonging no longer to one location rather than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another” (Bowles 14). Wright‟s travel account is more than a mere report of sites visited or a real account of the customs and manners of a new culture. Rather, his presentation of his travel narrative about Spain indicates essential personal and political outcomes of travel, in addition to a variety of uses of the travel narrative; his problem with the prospect of travel in this passage implies that there exists more at stake in travel than one may initially assume.

This scene can also represent a staging of modem African- American mobility. Wright is in

Europe with the power to control his movements, and as he is alone, he has the power to cross the border at will. The portrait of Wright sitting in the car with his hands on the steering wheel is a representation of agency. Wright‟s dramatic staging captures the importance of movement from one country to another, and it also figures the border between Spain and France as the border between freedom and oppression in its many forms. These first few pages are less about the mastery of that eye, and more about the struggle of will inside of Wright, the struggle between Wright‟s desire to see and his prior knowledge of the devastations of the Spanish Civil

War. Wright, as Weiss has shown, was writing on the Spanish Civil War in the thirties and began

175 thinking of Spain through the lens of the Communist Party he then served. Simultaneously, he took pride in the role of the African Americans who had fought there in the Abraham Lincoln brigade (Weiss 213). Wright‟s travel to Spain represents his willingness to understand and undermine the Spaniards source of oppression.

Wright‟s unwillingness to cross the boundary to Spain arises from the compilation of challenging problems he wants to discover through his journey in the country. His motivation to comprehend the “fate of Spain,” its decline from a modern republic into a dictatorship right after the Spanish Civil War, is a pursuit to be aware of the disappointment of social democracy to overcome tyranny worldwide. This collapse contradicts Wright‟s faith in humanism . His concentration on the dilemma of how individuals can live “after the death of the hope for freedom” demonstrates his increasingly pessimistic mindset concerning his capability to look for a place in which to live and write without restraints. In spite of his escalating discontentment with the freedom of life in exile (UQ 383), Wright begins to establish a powerful sensation towards freedom and desire in its wider sense. His investigation of both of these issues by using

Spain features Wright„s belief that local phenomena can be used to speak for larger international events.

II. Wright’s Discourse on Spanish Culture, Society, Religion, and Politics

Additionally, Wright declares his forcible perception that a writer can alternate from the local to the global. He displays that the ghetto experience itself is universal (Hakutani, African

American Modernism 122). His trip to Spain, then, turns into a journey of understanding a personal concern; this is why thinking about Spain “hurt” and “haunted” him, looking at a local matter such as “the fate of Spain” itself, and becoming familiar with an international challenge

176 how individuals survived tyranny and after losing hope of attaining freedom. For Wright, travel might be a dominating venture, the results of which have private, local, and transnational ramifications. Wright‟s most powerful reactions of uneasiness and experience of danger come at the outset of Pagan Spain, when he was deliberating whether or not to head to Franco‟s country at all:

I wanted to go to Spain, but something was holding me back …

God knows, totalitarian governments and ways of life were no

mysteries to me. I had been born under an absolutist racist regime

in Mississippi; I had lived and worked for twelve years under the

political dictatorship of the Communist Party of the United States;

… So why avoid the reality of life under Franco? What

was I scared of? (PS 1)

Wright‟s reaction is that Franco‟s triumph and “the fate of Spain had hurt me, had haunted me”

(PS 2). Then there is the issue already described and this is the question that haunts the book:

“How did one live after the death of hope and freedom?” There is humanist ramification here, for the hope for freedom could be the desire for redemption, an urgent need through which

Wright secretly lives. Moreover, the exercise of freedom is the display of the interest in having universal peace. Wright also views himself equipped with the resources of a penetrative writer.

So why was Spain the destination Wright used to investigate his more robust queries about political tyranny and the human reaction to it when it is obvious in the introduction that he has encountered tyranny in other places? Moreover, why did his trip to Spain instigate the striking image of a trip to Africa right after his introduction? We could start to notice a solution to these

177 queries in the letter from Wright to his agent, Paul Reynolds, where he suggests that his book on

Spain should present “how a non-western people living in Europe work out their life problems”

(qtd. in Fabre, UQ 411). His proposal unveils his beliefs with regards to both Spain‟s relation to most of Europe and what Spain as a region could give a writer. Spain offers an instance of the

“Other” positioned within the West. He understands that while a part of Europe, Spain‟s vicinity to Africa and historical connection to the racial and cultural Otherness help it become a volatile signifier of identification. For Wright, consequently, Spain could be represented as a hybrid space, a contact area through which one could examine sophisticated challenges regarding the connection of the West to the world by examining the Spanish people and lifestyle. Wright indicates that Spain is a distinct space which could provide fodder for research of different identities essential to this relationship, including the dynamics of the national and racial identities that have described the West as a notion.

This examination will not analyze the historical precision of the representations of Spain in

Wright‟s writing about Spain; that is, it will not seek to assess the veracity of these images of

Spain as “objective” accounts of the places and history though this might be an interesting task, yielding interesting outcomes pertaining to difficulties of translation since there are many challenging renderings of Spanish culture throughout. A close reading of the patterns of the representations of Spain created by an African American discloses the ways that travel writings have been beneficial for a group that was politically marginalized at home. Spain is depicted in numerous ways with regards to other spaces, including the U.S., the Middle East, Europe, and

Africa. It is referred to as a liminal zone between these various geographical spaces and is used to disturb clear variations between them, that is, between East and West, North and South. The impact of this interruption is an undoing of an inherited “imaginative geography” that affiliates

178 these regional categories and national spaces with unique cultural identities (Said, Orientalism

54-5). Thus, cultural meaning and values are designated by certain material areas, and these connotations reveal the relationships between the creator of theses spaces as well as their subjects. Despite betraying at times Wright‟s culturally bound Western viewpoints, Pagan Spain generates counter-narratives that not only challenge Anglo-American representations of Spain but also take part in a cultural critique of the U.S. and the West more generally.

In the literary representation Pagan Spain provides, the mapping of space mirrors a significant remapping of identities linked with those spaces. To put it differently, Wright takes the opportunity of reconfiguring geographic spaces to reconsider racial, ethnic, and national identities and the capability of transnationalism to surpass these categories. The utilization of

Spain as a space to remap the entire world helps with this modification. Spain‟s position as a liminal space opens it up for representations that fit various purposes. Spain as a space can project ideas about the identities we have inherited and also identities we could envision as Spain is symbolized in a different way. The figure of the Moor, linked to Spain‟s medieval history, is especially useful as an image that allows such thinking about the dynamics and uses of these identities. Like Spain, the Moor turns into a shifting signifier concerning race, ethnicity, and religion, and is particularly beneficial for contemplating the types of new relationships and alliances that might be achievable as group identities are reimagined: “Travel writing is perhaps the mediative genre par excellence” for considering issues that transnationalism increases as a framework for American Studies because it so obviously concentrates on cultural exchanges that manifest “the nation in tension with categories of analysis that transcend national boundaries

[such as] networks of race, ethnicity, religion, and class” (Fox 639, 642). For Wright, travel

179 writing could be fruitfully examined to investigate the outcomes of travel at both individual and socio-political levels and its influence on expanding his worldview.

Due to the number of forms of mobility and migrations experienced by people, the idea of travel encompasses many things. As James Clifford has brought up, the idea of travel “goes a certain distance and falls apart into none equivalents, overlapping experiences marked by different translation terms: „diaspora,‟ „borderland,‟ „,‟ „migrancy,‟ „tourism,‟

„pilgrimage,‟ „exile‟” (Routes 11). Also, as those within diasporic studies would remind us, not all travel is voluntary. To split up travel from the material demands that cause various forms of exile and migration, the concept of a travel is usually comprehended to entail a pace of freedom and opportunity for the traveler, even if the subject position of the traveler may influence the traveler‟s experience, whether this is due to race, gender or class. Travel can be described as a

“practice featuring human movement through culturally conceived space, generally undertaken with at least some expectation of an eventual return to the place of origin” (Gilbert and Johnson

5).

This meaning enables a number of motives for movement as well as the distance traveled.

The traveler starts a journey and finds out not only the “other” but also the self as identified through the other, as the traveler gets to be conscious of being not only a spectator but also the object being perceived by the culture visited: “Indeed, one does not become a stranger until one is viewed by someone else … for both visitor and the visited view each other and contribute to the construction of new identities” (Roberson xviii). As a result, travel can be a “profoundly unsettling yet enlightening experience,” a progression through which the self transends its limitations “a disturbing yet potentially empowering practice of difference” (Trinh 23). The

180 travel writing that recreates journeys to other places shows not only these major outcomes but also the degree, shape, and content of these stories which are thoroughly related to the contexts from which they derive. As noticed in tales of historical fiction, informative accounts of foreign societies, and romantic ventures looking for the modernist self, the type of travel writing moves to pursue its numerous capabilities.

Lately, Robert Tally has branded such a geographic approach to studying literary texts, that is, reading them through the lens of geography. In “Geocriticism and Classic American

Literature,” Tally describes how literary narratives, in his specific case nineteenth-century U.S. literary narratives, like conventional geographic maps, help to represent spaces “to give shape to a conceptual or imaginary geography that would allow individuals and communities to orient themselves” (3). This literary cartography created in written texts functions as both a map of physical geography and a speaker or character‟s plotting out of their intellectual map to make sense of the entire world in an well-organized way. Geographical maps, of course, are designed to clarify the world in which we discover ourselves. They are strategies of imagining the complex relationships between the tangible and intangible components of our environment, providing strategies for us to comprehend and think of these relations (Abrams and Hall 1).

Because it is dependent on the process of selecting what is essential to represent, mapping signifies the method of language translation; therefore, all interface choices for a map have an agenda. Maps symbolize the geographical thinking of the culture that produces them, and, in turn, they help create that culture‟s imaginative geography by providing a way of understanding and orienting oneself and one‟s culture in the world.

181

Wright‟s bold and productive commingling of European and American mark his transnational influences. A New World antecedent made such fruitful commerce possible and laid the foundation for the flourishing perspective of Wright‟s worldview. Having said that,

Wright‟s appeal is solidly situated in the present “those landscapes of subjective ruins that strew our world today—ruins that are harder to detect and much more difficult to appreciate” (PS 163).

One can imagine what these ruins are, but evidently the crucial element about them is an amount of critical distance necessary to apprehend them. Within this scene, Wright is writing opposed to the practice of modem literature as an inauthentic, non-critical course of action to discovering cultures. By observing the hybrid roots of Europe and the trace of these roots in sites usually related to Europe as the “old world.” Wright was convinced that Europe could help him better understand the American problem through the freedom that he experiences in there (Fabre,

World of Richard Wright 146). Wright is performing vital work that leads to an awareness of

European control as an approach that is historical, a major intervention in Euro-American travel narrative.

A key work here is Orientalism where Said uses the perception of imaginative geography as the method through which cultural meanings and values are assigned to particular material spaces and the ways in which these meanings mirror the relations between the creators of such spaces and their subjects (Orientalism 54-5). A different way to consider this scene would be to view it as Wright‟s disapproval of Spain because of its recognized readiness to bring in the past as the most significant resource of its national identity. The ephemeral perception of mapping of nations and cultures is functional. The landscape is temporary, and thus the reasons on which we stand are usually provisional. Consequently, the highest requirement for maps seems to take

182 place when the very idea of maps of fixing as well as delineating boundaries is called into question.

Wright reads Muslim Spain as a locus of cultures and religions, a wellspring of the

European Renaissance. Long-suppressed as part of the reconquest and still ignored in much of

Western scholarship, the eight hundred-year experiment implies a lost transnational impulse in

Spain. Wright‟s reconstitution of this “lost” history combines a utopian evocation of eleventh- century Cordoba with an implicit critique of state-led modernization and nationalism in the postcolonial era that reduced a history of a thousand years, erasing not only Arab history but classical Arabic philosophy and literature. Through the use of the relics of Alhambra and

Generalife, Wright‟s Spain offers a unique accommodation to the growing forces of homogenization and Westernization in global context. In the same vein, in Granada, Wright went to the Alhambra and also the palace Generalife. The far-sightedness of Wright‟s viewpoints is clearly highlighted in his descriptions of the palace and the gardens

I wandered over the ruins of Alhambra and Generalife ...

and walked through the palace, the fortress and the summer

gardens, then among the vast brick battlements erected

centuries earlier by the Moors ... These relics represented

the terminal point of influence of the East and Africa in Europe.

Since the vanquishing of the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella...

the tide of history had reversed itself and Europe, with a long

and bloody explosion ,had hurled itself upon the masses of mankind

in Asia and Africa and the then unknown Americas. (PS 161-62)

183

Wright, here, does not romanticize the episode regarding Ferdinand and Isabella‟s conquest of

Spain. Instead, he details a “long and bloody explosion.” In this passage of The Alhambra,

Wright places his work within the context of a tradition in which he shares; he demonstrates how his perception, borne of his transnational experience, plays a role in that tradition.

Wright‟s apprehension of the landscape is much more than visual; it is critical. Even while he acknowledges the appeal of the sensory example of the enormous architecture, he expressly writes against an aesthetic or system of portrayal that casts the spectator without critical faculty, under the spell of the visual:

The crumbling Moorish monuments stretched over acres.

What massive and brutal simplicity, what long straight lines!

The moldering clues left by a race of alien temperament

tried vainly to speak, to explain. Through the pathos of distance

one felt that that vanished race must have been of titanically

child-like disposition, for it had sought to fill all space with

a kind of visual dream that blotted out the real reality of the world...

[W]herever the eye roved, clusters of sparkling images caressed the

senses ... [C]ascading waterfalls fell with such steadied and trickling

momentum that their musical cadences made you feel, through empathy,

the aesthetic moods of the men who created them...It was a paradise, but

a static one. (PS 162)

Wright‟s journey through Spain took him to some of the common public sites, the corrida, the church, the hotel, and, in other circumstances, to locations that were extremely off the

184 outdone track of mainstream travel books. In his coverage of more typical sites, Wright insistently reads in opposition to the grain of Euro-American traditions of representation. His reading of those sites off the path—private homes, the third class rail coach, bordellos covert and otherwise—is somewhat a departure from both American and Afro-American representations of

European region because they claim to reveal the exotic, low spaces of life abroad. Even though travelers before Wright had certainly moved through those places within Europe, they by no means noticed them as central for their representational tasks. Wright‟s worldview is shaped with his firm grasp of the dense, reciprocal entailments of transnationalism and nationalism, combined with his abiding, thought ambivalent, attraction to homeland and expatriate residence. Wright‟s topographical methods creates a richly ambiguous geographical idiom that deepens his ties to history and expresses his transnational predicament by evoking contrasts between the Old World and the New. In doing so, Wright brings about a transnational hybridization of Spanish and

American influences that allowed him to mitigate and contravene the limiting deficiencies of each. In Pagan Spain, he triggers the relations among the several civilizations that wrought the

Spanish history. His attraction to sheer range of sources that went into the making of a stance is exemplified by his formal approach to describing the past of Spain against the richness of historical events and sights.

Despite divergence of viewpoints, Wright‟s strategy of analyzing culture resonates with that of W.E.B. DuBois. His passage through Spain echoes DuBois‟ passage through the

American South in The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois‟ attempt in that work was to find out the personality of African-Americans who resided “within the veil” of race. Robert Stepto‟s reading of The Souls of Black Folk concentrates on the centrality of emblematic location and the ritual grounds charted from the narrator in that geography; ritual grounds are “those specifically Afro-

185

American spatial configurations within the structural topography that are... elaborate responses to social structures in this world, or paraphrasing Ralph Ellison, what other men call reality” (68).

These structures, prototyped by the slave quarters, “serve as a spatial expression of the tensions and contradictions besetting any reactionary social structure...subsumed by dominant social structure. The grand tension is that of self-initiated mobility versus self-imposed confinement”

(68). Stepto proceeds to state that an important part of DuBois‟ mission is to locate “fresh spaces in which black and white Americans discover bonds beyond those generated by social-structured race rituals” and at the same time to represent genius loci, central sites of cultural immersion for the narrator (Stepto70). In Pagan Spain, the ritual grounds that Wright crosses through are the corrida, the church, the bar, the Spanish home, and the pension. These domestic spaces present the most atypical view in relation to Euro-American representations of Spain and Europe spaces, and because these are the sites where Wright tries to accomplish some attachment with Spanish culture and individual Spaniards.

Wright‟s opinion of the Alhambra, one of several sites that make up an element of the convention of the Hispanist representations of picturesque Spain, further signifies his impulse to demystify the scene. Wright remains within the Parador, “one of a number of establishments maintained by the Spanish government for the convenience of tourists ... Located in picturesque settings” (PS 161). The hallmarks of picturesque Spain, mountains, “olive groves, orange trees, hedges, flowers,” which surround the Alhambra disturb Wright because they “made a landscape that was so beautiful as to be unreal” (PS 161). The usual figures that inhabit that landscape, the

“peasant women … making lace” and “old men … fabricating inlaid wooden boxes”, are equally displeasing to Wright because of their association with the picturesque: “It was a distinctly feudal atmosphere better suited to the days of the Moorish kings who once ruled here some five

186 hundred years ago than to our nervous, atomic twentieth century” (PS 161).Wright names the

Alhambra a “monstrous pile of dead glory” (PS 162). The imagery and symbolism in this description are dense. One of the most useful devices that may be utilized in such an examination is what Bhabha has called a nation‟s “narrative address”: “Nation and Narration seeks to assert and expand Frantz Fanon‟s revolutionary credo: „National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension‟” (Nation Narrative 3,

4). In nations having a colonial past, like Spain, this narrative address was either developed by or viewed by, others; the national vision was not to valorize purposeful technological progress toward some commonly held goal, but rather for a space clear of occupation where national identity could finally be established.

Wright has tried to assist in this perseverance, by suggesting a number of emblematic constructs which had a variety of meanings. Although this type of expansion of images and density of meaning usually implies informative observer, the compactness of expressions is there because Wright considers the site of the Alhambra as a ritual ground that locates the framework of the connection between East and West in time and space:

These relics represent the terminal point of the influence of the

East and Africa in Europe. From the vanquishing of the Moors by

Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, the trend of history has reversed itself

and Europe, with a long and bloody explosion, had hurled itself upon

the masses of mankind in Asia and Africa and the then unknown

Americas. (PS 162)

187

As for Wright, the remains of the Alhambra indicate the place of the starting of the process of

European imperialism. This part of Wright‟s work is to chart Europe after post-colonialism. It implies the period that started when previous European colonies commenced the process of disengaging with Europe. This site is a key stop for a traveler involved in writing on imperialism and colonialism, or writing the history of those same processes. The Alhambra is where ancient

African/Eastern imperialism came to an end and where modem European imperialism started.

The other stunning thing about this reading is the scarcity of any pan-African gesture of affiliation between contemporary diasporic African cultures and the North African architects of the ruins. The possible lack of such a move suggests that Wright‟s view of Europe accentuates that he is reluctant to make the gesture at the cost of his historical perspective on European history.

To achieve this task, Stuart Hall has asserted that identity should not be diminished to a concrete group of essentialist features or qualities but is a practice of the articulation of identity, and has targeted our focus on the process of identity construction (becoming) rather than on a product (being). Hall argues for a concept of identity as “a production which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (234). This perception paves the ground for transnational interpretation of Wright‟s visit to Spain. Wright participated in transnationalism through his challenges to national and racialized essentialist identities. Among the main questions of the foundational work in this field is how one might map identity that could counter these habits that come up in conjunction with the nationalism that emerged along with the geographic imaginary of modernity. A heritage of past and ongoing migration discounts any simple idea of ethnic or national identification, especially when the subjects are not incorporated or smoothly assimilated into their new national communities. Since

188

Transnationalism boasts a possibility to question nationalistic ideas of space and identity, Wright has efficiently utilized it to intercede in the traditions of identification in the framework of modernity.

What interferes with Wright in this scene is the seductiveness of the landscape, which becomes an avenue for a kind of false contact with that “race of alien temperament.”

Spectatorship related to tourism is eventually declined by Wright here since it restricts the viewer and endeavors to position the viewer either beyond the borders of time or else completely in the past. An excerpt from Existentialism and Humanism uncovers Sartre‟s request for a humanist existentialism and broader understanding of the self and the other: “The man who becomes aware of himself through the Cogito also perceives all others … The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself” (52). In the same manner, Wright can re-vision this scene of seduction when he notices that a cathedral was constructed within the ruins, thus exposing the construction of the site: “it was odd to observe the successive layers of civilization lapping one over the other; in Granada one sees successive layers of civilization lapping one over the other” (PS 162). Wright “glanced” at the site again, indicating a lesser degree of visual engagement, and then claims that his “twentieth century hunger could not be sated here [in Spain]” (PS 163). Wright manages simultaneously to sketch the conditions of

Western mobility after modernity. Spain‟s scenery is referred to as the place of Wright‟s wanderings through his understanding of the devastations of the civil war.

Meanwhile, Wright holds with him the knowledge of the disasters of European war and racism in Mississippi, a knowledge that turns into a metaphysical barrier to his capability to cross the border, one that is self-imposed: “I had no wish to resuscitate mocking recollections while

189 roaming a land whose free men had been shut in concentration camps, or exiled, or slain” (PS 2).

Wright does not wish to know the real landscape of Spain because it is haunted by restriction and tyranny, the absence of mobility. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy argues that black intellectuals have consciously created works with a transnational frame of reference in an attempt to

“transcend both the structures of the and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19). In a similar way, Wright‟s insertion of himself as a free man guiltily roaming through that unfree landscape that he had dealt with textually is very much an element of

Western representations of itself after modernity.

The indifferent surroundings of the “white man‟s lament” returns as Wright definitively gets into Spain and his utilization of the pronoun “my,” in “my first Spanish town” (PS 2), makes it evident that this is a Spain that is accessible for his eye. His account of Le Perthus actually situated in France, instead of Spain, is a mistake that very nicely emphasizes the indeterminacy of that space relies upon a comparison between the Spanish landscape and metropolitan centers of France. As compared to the “rush of life in Nice, Cannes, and Paris,” Le Perthus “seemed alien of aspect, torpid, forgotten, marooned in the past” (PS 2). This Hispanist manifestation of

Spain can make it clear that Wright views Spain as an independent thing from the rest of Europe.

Wright‟s spatiotemporal utilization of the hotel indicates his occupation of the part of contemporary Western tourist in a third-world country. He discusses the exchange rates of “a peseta [that] has roughly the value of a large Irish potato” (PS 3) and the drawback of the room according to the standards of Western hotels.

More than contemporary concepts of hybridity, which often rest on a discreetly biologized perception of culture, Wright‟s concentration on rationalism and progress creates a greater style

190 of transnational and raceless humanity. Almost nothing makes this sharper than Pagan Spain‟s discussion of “white Negroes” (PS 138), Hazel Rowley argues that Wright took part in the

Second American Writers‟ Congress in New York City of 1937, where Ernest Hemingway as a war media reporter in Spain, criticized Franco as well as fascism, and that Wright recognized commonalities between the oppressed of Spain and the “American Negro” (126). However,

Pagan Spain entirely inverts Black-White model, exchanging stereotyped racial essentialism with racial indeterminacy. Nevertheless, Wright‟s indeterminacy is not based on a vaguely hybrid or liminal identity, but alternatively on an educated, disciplined self whose race cannot be fixed.

The chapter “The Underground Christ” narrates the experience of one of Spain‟s persecuted

Protestants, a woman who has been jailed and subjected to state monitoring due to her belief.

Wright says, “What drew my attention to the plight of Protestants in Spain were the undeniable and uncanny affinities that they had in common with American Negroes, Jews, and other oppressed minorities” (PS 138). The reason of this statement, Wright‟s affinity for Spanish

Protestants was interpreted in terms of a purely structural parallel: black people in America are oppressed; Spanish Protestants are oppressed; the oppression provides them a commonality.

Oppression is not restricted to a certain group of people. Regardless of race, religion or nationality, people can be denied their civil rights. Wright‟s statement is an attempt to universalize oppression and the need to face it.

However, given Pagan Spain‟s total approval of the Protestant ethic against the norms of Catholicism, it is fully fair to read Wright‟s interest in the Spanish Protestants with regards to content. Narrating the anonymous woman‟s persecution, Wright declares, “She was the sort of woman who walked the streets of America and England every day, totally free and unafraid. Her only crime was that she was a Protestant and that she lived in Spain” (PS 146). But it is difficult

191 to believe the woman‟s crime is just that of an atypical spiritual affiliation, given what Wright later says concerning the huge distinction in rationality and social wealth between Protestant

America on one hand, and Catholic Spain on the other. Wright unveils that from the viewpoint of

Franco‟s religious state, her activities as a Protestant are indeed subversive. When she is challenged by the government, the woman claims that she is “trying to save the children of the streets for God” (PS 145). This action has required “going into a small village…[searching] the poorest families that [she] could find and ask[ing] the parents of those families if [she] could teach the Bible to their children” (PS 140). This means that, the woman does from the bottom up what Wright wanted Nkrumah to do from the top down: she attempts to eliminate traditions and empower the Spanish people through literacy and willpower: “I resolved to give my life to try to redeem my country from Catholicism” (PS 140). In point of fact, her concentration on the

“ascent to literacy” has an expressly religious content; yet the atheist Wright clearly encourages such ideals, that are able to secularization and lend themselves to worldly empowerment. As

Wright claims the “dense, artistically cluttered Catholic countries of present-day Europe” may find his rationalism “chilling, arid, almost inhuman”; nevertheless, “emotional independence is a clear and distinct human advance … Freedom needs no apology” (“Tradition and

Industrialization” 84, 85). In a nutshell, Pagan Spain‟s missionary for the poor functions as a

“Protestant rebel” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 89) who wants to promote the cultural uprising that altered Northern Europe.

For Wright, the “white Negro” (PS 138) is a white person who has taken on cultural codes that the author has revealed as black. Nonetheless, Wright‟s codes reverberate Stepto‟s version of the ascent to literacy. They also catch Black Boy‟s fundamental ideology very well, and in Wright‟s introduction to Black Metropolis, he stresses that “[T]he American Negro, child

192 of the culture that crushes him, wants to be free in a way that white men are free; for him to wish otherwise would be unnatural, unthinkable. Negroes, with but minor exceptions, still believe in the hope of economic rewards; they believe in justice, liberty, the integrity of the individual. In the heart of industrial America is a surviving remnant, perchance a saving remnant of a passion for freedom, a passion fanned by their national humiliation” (xxv). The main difference between

Black Metropolis‟s introduction and Wright‟s travel writing in Spain is that the latter describes the bearers of this “saving remnant” as not merely American Negroes but oppressed people of color around the world, as well as oppressed white Europeans- in brief, a cultural coalition that traverses racial boundaries. The notion of “white Negro,” then, eventually dissolves race into a worldwide movement which promotes ideals that influential leaders in the modern West have ignored or left behind, namely, the “precious heritage—the freedom of speech, the secular state, the independent personality, the autonomy of science—which is not Western or Eastern, but human” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 103). In Wright‟s view, only such beliefs and institutions will make race not matter. Wright‟s independence as a thinker and his autobiographical predilections say much that is still worth thinking about the partnership of the

West to the non-Western world.

After considering Wright‟s relationship to America and to the non-Western world, one can “probably [notice] how modern his attitude is and how relevant to our present concerns with freedom, the cultural revolution, and the making of a world civilization” (Fabre, “Wright‟s

Exile” 139). Definitely, Pagan Spain is a reaction toward an expansion of community and an attempt to find cultural interconnection. One may contend that Wright‟s travel writing challenges the Protestant ethic so much that the notion does not actually lend itself to race-free rationality and secularism, but alternatively amounts to a set of white cultural codes that can probably battle

193 or denigrate black vernacular expression. This possible debate clarifies the reason why Pagan

Spain received very little attention, even from critics who have sought to reappraise the worth of

Wright‟s travel writing, given that Pagan Spain does not readily lend itself to the version of a specifically black modernity. Wright was not a cultural homogenizer. Yet Wright‟s point about hybridity suggests that one should go through a process of self-formation that involves rationalism, discipline, and education to be a transnational hybrid:

Back of this indigenous poverty and supporting it is a naively pagan

attitude toward life that is the opposite of the practical: a love of ritual

and ceremony; a delight in color and movement and sound and harmony;

an extolling of sheer emotion as the veritable end of human striving;

a deification of tradition that lifts them out of the world that is shared

by most Western mankind ; a continuous lisping about greatness, honor,

glory, and bravery; a dull doting on the surface aspect of things; an

infantile insistence on one‟s own feelings as the only guide and rule

of living. (PS 151)

All this has the ring of what Wright states about Africa in Black Power, and it appears to have triggered responses among Spaniards and some experts on Spain. Several reviewers of

Pagan Spain asserted that Wright did not know either Spain or Spanish well enough to assess the country. Some of them pointed to factual errors in the text to back up their criticisms. Harry

Carman predicted that “Spaniards undoubtedly will hate the book.” Also, Hakutani reports that

Pagan Spain has still not been published in Spain (Racial Discourse 195). No critic of the book, however, questioned the reliability of the fundamental totalitarian canvas on which Wright drew

194 his Spaniards. As in Black Power, enough of the essential information is in place to maintain

Wright‟s interpretive flights legitimate. One reviewer reported that Wright had concentrated his attention on lower class people and that this had deformed his portrait, but, as in “Blueprint for

Negro Writing”, Wright probably felt that the lower classes were the representative class, specifically in a rustic nation as held by poverty as the Spain he visited. Whatever the case, as

Hakutani explains, aristocrats and the middle-class people are not absent from the book. Carmen, for instance, appears to come from the middle class. Hakutani pinpoints what may have been an origin of a reviewer‟s discomfort with the book when he writes,

[s]ome American readers “were shocked to see” a black writer discuss a

white culture. Before Wright, a usual pattern had been for a Western

anthropologist or a Western writer like Joseph Conrad to comment on

Asian or African life. If Wright considered himself an African, his

situation would have been the opposite of that of a Western writer. He

thus declared: “I was reversing roles” . . . on the other hand, he

regarded himself as an American writer, his comments on Europe …

signaled a reversal of the comments of Alexis de Tocqueville and D.H.

Lawrence … from today‟s vantage point, Wright‟s view of Spain

remains a unique cultural criticism. (Racial Discourse 197)

Probably the most pernicious results of the “possessive investment in whiteness” (George

Lipsitz), as Hakutani‟s passage proposes, is the approaches in which it limits intellectual freedom: what is deemed appropriate or inappropriate topic for an author. In the review of Pagan

Spain, for instance, Roi Ottley announced, „This distinguished writer‟s gifts and insights as a

195 novelist might be better served in reporting such dramas as now unfold in Montgomery,

Tallahassee and Clinton, Tenn. They are tailor made for his talents” (Ottley, “He Should Stick to

Fiction”). Ottley‟s review is common of unfavorable evaluations of Pagan Spain, in that it criticizes Wright for moving out of bounds both in terms of genre as well as in terms of the objects by writing about a culture outside of an American South that by that point was in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement. Other critics also described Wright‟s expertise to achieve this form of cultural work, concentrating instead on the evident subjectivity of his take on Spain.

The U.S. civil rights drama certainly was made for Wright‟s talents, but so was Spain‟s, as was most of the crisis in the Gold Coast. What Wright considers in Spain as in Africa is economic poverty born from the penury of the soul that unsublimated „spirituality‟ really is. For

Francis E. McMahon, Wright‟s established trendy secularism guaranteed that Spain could be beyond his understanding. McMahon contended that the “modern dogmas” of “rationalism, sentimental humanitarianism, sociological determinism, [and] Freudian pan-sexualism,” all crammed into Wright‟s “undisciplined mind,” make it “difficult to conceive of anyone less equipped to understand Spain.” McMahon adds that these dogmas bode” ill for the future of

Western culture.” In Pagan Spain, Wright reacted and attempted to eliminate the representation of the future as McMahon wished it to be. For Wright, the dogmas McMahon would fight for are the actual risks. This is why Wright takes care to highlight the imperialist distortion within the

Spanish paganism. At the bottom of the Spanish attitude toward life is a “training that has conditioned them to expect to sustain their lives by being overlords of the „morally‟ less pure, to the „spiritually‟ inferior; all of which finds its ultimate sanction and justification in the practices and canons of Spanish Catholicism” (PS 151). What terrifies Wright most about imperialism and

196 totalitarianism approved by God is its determinism-its inclination to smash persons like himself, who have no country or race or tradition, and whose selected function is that of caretaker of the future: citizen into the future and a world citizen of probability.

Wright is the complete opposite of someone like Pagan Spain reviewer Eva J. Ross, who said her travels exposed that most Spaniards appeared content under Franco, as long as they were able to dance, chat and “go to their literary circles,” and that the delight of the Spanish poor in their hardship was “a true appreciation of the transiency of human suffering and something

Wright cannot understand.” No matter what an understanding of the transiency of human despair might be, Wright traveled to Spain without it. Even though he was completely middle-class himself, Wright‟s utopian perspective integrated an emphasis on racial and class inequality. He explores “de-Occidentalization of mankind” in which East and West could be substituted for “an ordered, rational world in which we all can share” (CC 594). As a result, Wright‟s Pagan Spain illustrates the crucial social elements that allow the innovative power of transnational viewpoint.

Because of the persecution he suffered as a black American, Wright dreamed of the extension of his hard-won freedom to everyone.

To give Wright‟s dream of freedom more rational dimension, one can revert to Sartre‟s

Existentialism and Humanism which discloses that interconnection among individuals to obtain freedom. Sartre declares: “We want freedom for freedom‟s sake and in every particular circumstance. However, in wanting freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours (52). Based on Sartre, this intersubjectivity makes up the existential humanism. While every person is totally free and consequently and completely accountable for his or her behavior, he or she is simultaneously

197 also determined by the recognition of others and accountable for the outcomes that chosen actions have for other people. This understanding is specifically the one that Wright tends to make in Pagan Spain: other humans matter, in spite of nation or race. To accomplish these goals for people of the East and West, one should become aware of the encircling dangers that seized their independence and kept them backward. For that reason, although Wright felt endangered to condemn Franco‟s regime, he did not think twice to indicate the resource of Spanish agony in a nation that resided under the yoke of dictatorship. Wright shows that Franco‟s regime is the primary cause of the Spaniard‟s suffering, an outlook that was propelled by his universal, rational worldview.

Franco was victorious, and the casualties among American volunteers were substantial.

The violence of modem war was well-documented, and Wright, like other leftists, had been frustrated by the defeat. His repulsion toward Spain was unremarkable among American intellectuals of the left. Wright seemed to be intrigued by Franco‟s Spain, nevertheless. The drive powering that interest, his need to find out “[h]ow did one live after the death of the hope for freedom ?” (PS 2) resonates with his knowledge of African American challenges and the struggles of oppressed people in general. It is his interest in this question that seemed to allow him to overcome his revulsion long enough in order to cross the border between Spain and

France.

What Wright witnessed in Spain nearly two decades after Franco‟s ascension to power was stunning. He noticed corrupt priests who established deals with the government, the glorification of prostitution and the suppression of virgins, thoughtlessly committed Catholics, harassed religious groups struggling to perform their religious beliefs, the lack of a free press, and a

198 intimidated Spanish youth compelled to follow a political doctrine that discouraged independence and stifled mobility. Wright heard echoes of the Mississippi youth. The corrupt priests reminded him of the day a “tall, black preacher” stopped by Wright's mother's house for a dinner of fried chicken. As he informs us in Black Boy, Wright resented the preacher because he

“learned at once that [the minister], like his father, was used to having his own way” (BB 33).

The passionate Catholics could just have easily been the Seventh-Day Adventists who nurtured

Wright on “restless hunger” and long, sleep deprived evenings. And definitely the Spanish youth made to master the catechism reminded Wright when he was forced to attend a religious school, where the boys and girls “were will-less, their speech flat, their gestures vague, their personalities devoid of anger, hope, laughter, enthusiasm, passion, or despair … they were claimed wholly by their environment” (BB 115-16). The shaping consequences of nationality and history in the rendering of Wright‟s favorite settings presented a lasting ambivalence. Wright‟s transnational quality is due simply to the fact that he had the opportunity to travel to different continents Africa, Europe and Asia. When he wrote about Spain, the conditions of the Spaniards were not different from those he lived under Jim Crow. In Spain, Wright‟s imagination created his dream world, conditioned as it was by the world in which he lived. The real world behind

Wright‟s was the world of Mississippi, Memphis, and Chicago that he knew.

In Spain, Wright had witnessed everything before; it was as if he had not left

Mississippi. As he had reported upon his arrival in Spain: “In one half hour I had plunged my hands into Spanish life and had brought up poverty, fear ... [and] illiteracy” (PS 21). Reported by

Wright, the distinction between Spain and almost all Western Europe “lay in the area of the secular that Western man, through the centuries and at tragic cost, had won and wrung from his own religious and irrational consciousness. In Spain, there was no lay, no secular life” (PS 192).

199

To Wright Spain was all religion. Wright would display how sorting out “life problems” under a holy nation, a sacred state Wright termed “pagan,” often meant a nightmarish appearance of hopelessness as well as despair.

Even with his overall focus on religious beliefs, Wright probed other facets of life in

Spain, particularly state policies. As he says in Pagan Spain, “before going into Spain [his] ideas about its problems had been mainly political” (PS 191). He had envisioned that he was “going to be deeply concerned about comparing the economic conditions under Franco with those that prevailed before and under the Republic” (PS 191). He was primarily fascinated by Franco, and the Falange party, and regularly cited from Formation Politica: Lecciones para las Flechas, the

Fascist holy book, to explain the way the government dominated the Spanish people. Joseph

Harrison considers Wright‟s Pagan Spain utilization of the catechism as “a shrewd device”

(289). This catechism, which functioned as a structural device in Pagan Spain, was stark enough to demonstrate the flaws of the regime. Furthermore the catechism, which permeates the whole book, “dealt with the aims and principles of the Franco regime and was in the simple form of questions and answers” (PS 13). David Bakish indicates the following comparison: “The words of a religious and fascistic catechism alternate with prescribed response that is to be memorized, not a gospel-style free response, but just as uncritical. And Wright's comments on Spain‟s religious bartarism in fact everything … is a rebellious gospel parishioner's critical response called up by the sermon or catechism” (Bakish 85). Excerpts varied in content material, from the future of Spain to several ways that Spanish youth should assist their country.

For instance, the “First Lesson” from the catechism talks about the destiny of the

Motherland and the purpose all Spanish people were supposed to perform in “the natural order of

200 things” (PS 22). The catechism preserves that to achieve Spain‟s success the country needs to practice its power on other nations. At times, this ensured by immediate conquest, by taking control of another country “by force of arms” (PS 24). For Wright, this lesson epitomized the propagandistic jargon of the fascist state. The “natural order of things” worked as an instrument to maintain the Protestants and other unprivileged in their place. Wright states in a mutual future, but he understands the futility in this particular target, particularly if specific communities declined a role in the foreseeable future growth and development of their country. That the

Falange advocated “conquest” persuaded Wright that Spain had improved little in the last five centuries in stark contrast to France.

Wright allows the catechism to speak for itself. That is, seldom does he discuss the thirteen excerpts from the “Lessons,” which he randomly inserts at the end of chapters. The one time he does, he encapsulates his attitude towards these ideas: “I sighed and closed the book. As yet I had not encountered a single practical idea … Something was bothering these Spanish ... If

Spain wanted to be great again, what I had read so far was the best guarantee that it would never happen” (PS 50). Near the last part of Pagan Spain, Wright remarks: “To accept the idiotic assumptions of the Spanish Falange was, of course, out of the question, that is, if one accepted living in an even somewhat rational world” (PS 194). Wright‟s use of the essential Falange propaganda as the principal structural device in his book unveils a publicized attack to the made- up unifying strand of the Spanish tradition.

Obviously, as Wright claims, the majority of what he observed in Spain was a distorted complaint that was opposed to the Duke‟s philosophy. The Duke and his group had drilled into the minds of the Spanish people an “instinct for revenge, an impulse toward hot rebellion, a

201 tortured desire to have done with the Duke and his class” (PS 70). Every place Wright traveled, people spoke of the suffering. The intellectuals criticized the Franco regime. A “great professor of law” with whom Wright conversed close to the last part of his trip points out: “But the simple truth is that most of the money in Spain is in the hands of a few landowners and a few industrialists. The national income of Spain does not permit industrialization without foreign aid.

We are poor; we are in the situation of many colonies” (PS 221). The “black shadow” (PS 55) of the Civil War continues to influence the minds and thoughts of the Spanish people. Poverty went on through Spain, and frequently Wright “had to make an effort to remember that people lived better lives elsewhere” (PS 178).

As Wright also shows in his travelogue, once he went to Spain his observations triggered other and various queries, concerns that revealed much more than only financial and political problems. As for Wright, “No neat, simple dialectical diagnosis of class relations could clarify the reality that had flooded in upon [him]” (PS 229). Pagan Spain, therefore, is a brilliant portrayal of Spain after the war and serious cultural criticism. Wright‟s Spain complicates the debate over postcolonial transnationalism by combining that debate with an equally lively one over ideological subjectivity; it challenges the notion that national traditions and rituals are unimportant or easily overcome in the real world. The representation of nation indicates that any centralized “transnational” community must be to some extent restrictive, and indeed hegemonic and authoritarian, in that it must eliminate local and national distinctions and contradicting visions. Therefore, the transition to trans-national existence is just that—a transition—and like all transitions, it can hardly be easy or uncontroversial.

202

Wright spends most of his attention to religion, as he had before in Black Power and

The Color Curtain. However, as outlined by Wright, there is more underneath the surface of issues. As Cobb explains, Wright employed comparable thoughts to non-Westerners ruled by custom and mysticism: “The rural, religious milieu that he rejected spelled poverty and degradation” (238). This approach toward religious connection and its consequences had been drawn from Wright‟s attempt to prevent narrow affinity to religious agendas that result most of the time in backwardness. It is only through secular humanism that the world could accomplish advancement. For Wright, the corrupt constitution of the Church lent itself to the sort of setup that might invariably create an underground. And when an outsider investigated the diverse routes of Catholicism, he would likely learn “in the end ... one fact: totalitarianism” (PS 221). It is apparent that once the proof was found, the reality regarding this “opiate” could be unveiled.

Spain was formally Catholic since Catholicism overlapped the Falange‟s interests.

Wright also blames the Church for the severe management of Spanish Protestants, a minority group like African Americans. He condemns the “needless ... and utterly barbarous”

(PS 138) treatment this group endured from both its Catholic neighbors and the highest authorities of the Church and State. Just as the white Southerner was not friendly to black

Americans, “the average Spaniard know nothing of Protestantism; do not know what a Protestant is; has never, to his knowledge, met one; and would stare with more bewilderment than hostility if he heard someone declare that he was Protestant” (PS 157). Wright points out the reason this harassed group inspired him to “have a spontaneous and profound sympathy” (PS 138):

I am an American Negro with a background … stemming

from my previous position as a member of a persecuted minority.

203

What drew my attention to the emotional plight of the Protestants

in Spain was the undeniable and uncanny psychological affinities

that they held in common with American Negroes, Jews, and other

oppressed minorities. It is another proof, if any is needed today,

that the main and decisive aspects of human reactions are conditioned

and are not inborn. (PS 138)

These words call to mind Wright‟s psychological interest in America and the West, which he defined in Black Power. What happened in Spain? Wright inquires close to the ending of his trip. To say the country “slept through a whole period of historical development” (PS 193) simplified the dilemma. Without a doubt, Spain had taken part in the science, art, and politics that had confirmed itself autonomously. Close to the end of his journey, Wright finds out that his own Westernness had averted his discovering the real truth. In perhaps his most debatable proclamation in the book, Wright honestly declares “Spain was not yet even Christian!” (PS

193). The paganism that had appeared underneath the Goths, the Romans, and the Moors somehow lingered on, thriving in the shadows of the twentieth century. Wright believes that

Spain hardly ever had been converted, not even to Catholicism.

The fluctuation and bafflement dominated in Spain as the Church‟s political, social, and economic agenda that assisted Franco regime. The Spaniards were living in skepticism, backwardness, and corruption at the social, religious, economic, and political levels. In Wright‟s view, Spain was in effect an exploited Third-World nation, brutally impoverished, presided over by a fascist dictator who manipulated tradition so as to preserve a firm social hierarchy. As an example, during his trip to Barcelona he visited Valencia together with an orange grower whose

204 efforts to grow the fruit had been stymied by the landowning upper class. As the farmer told

Wright, “The rich men who control the exporting of oranges make the political and social policies of the country. They have the endorsement and backing of the Church. The orange industry is controlled by the state in the interests of the rich, who, in turn, are backed by the

Church. That is the gist of it” (PS 27). Despite its geographical position and its historical popularity as one of the originators of Western imperialism, 1950s Spain occupied a peripheral role in the world system.

In Spain, Wright detects, the problems Carlos identified stimulated the Civil War that overthrew the Spanish Republic-whose authorities were able to “rectify this problem of land distribution.” Carlos argues that the Falangist government “reversed all the work of the

Republic” and was “more concerned about the restoration of the King than about irrigation” (PS

33). As for what the problem brought to people and their human capital, Carlos remarked that there was widespread corruption among Spanish officers. That is, they were defecting in groups from the state whose rules Carmen‟s catechism claimed. “Official stealing,” Carlos lamented,

“cheats the nation out of most of what little of the value we do have.” Though they lead him to suffer, Carlos was not ready to categorically condemn the defectors: “Our corruption is the only really human quality we have left” (PS 33). It is clear from these insights that Franco‟s government weakened ordinary standards by giving too little assistance to the totalitarian

“church” it forced everyone to go to. By impoverishing people instead of helping them to obtain property, it provided them incentives to comply with the convention of exploitation its behavior creates and participate in “Official stealing.”

205

An important element in Wright‟s trip is the train scene. The train represents a zone of

“zero degree culture” (Rosaldo 81), where the newly arrived moved between national spaces, histories, and traditions. The train is both torch and sword, and participated in the ambiguity of the symbols described above, for it efficiently separated the chosen from the rejected. The rituals of separation were carried out mechanically, with the same keen eye one would use to detect a defective product on an assembly line. If you were allowed in, though, the passage marked the beginning of another separation, a split between the past and the present, for immigrants were severed from particular histories and beliefs. The transformation started the moment the newly arrived stepped into the train.

Wright‟s description of the train station in which the inhabitants “shift uneasily from foot to foot, their eyes avoiding the muzzles of the machine guns on the arms of the Civil Guard” (PS

155) shows that he is surfing a nation where the population is taken over by a totalitarian government and also supports the surveillance to which the author is susceptible as a traveler and a writer in Spain. The circumstances on the train are squalid as compared to the problems

Wright has become familiar with on the French railway. Among the inhabitants of the coach is a woman who catches Wright‟s eye because she too is an observer of people: “[S]he was about forty, wore eyeglasses, and seemed to spend her time studying the other occupants of the compartment, including me, with an amused and ironic air.” Wright and the woman embark on shared eyeballing: “my eyes caught her looking at me with great wonder more than once” (PS

165). Though Wright seems hypervisible in this arena, there is a complete parity in the gazes of

Wright and the woman since the gazes move bidirectionally in between two people. Here Wright is stripped of his Americanness, that layer of nationhood that joins language, geography, and music, and is detached from the nation-state. The center becomes another site of fracture and dis-

206 memory where trajectories end. It is literally a pure terminal, a place where the rituals of cutting are carried out, especially in the face of the exclusionary logic: Either you belong or you do not.

It seems like the melting pot in reverse.

Wright portrays this experience with Senora Flamenco, as he names the woman, as an actual engagement in the Spanish culture. His initial comment on the structure of the group in the car is that they are a “diversified lot” (PS 156), which speaks to the idea that he considered them to be representative of Spanish society. This scene is interesting as it can be read in several traditions of representation of cultures at once. So the train is not linked to the feminine in written narratives, especially those authored by men. The train is associated with the privileged masculine gaze, and if one moves beyond the circle of the male, African-American gaze, it is also associated with the techniques of Euro-American control of the landscape, taking into account the place of the train in British domination of its Eastern empire. Wright‟s train scene is a reversal of the visual/masculinist/dominant associations of this space. Wright‟s drawing of the scene as an alternative provides the train as a uterine place covered with the aural as well as the gestural. Yet both boundaries imply distinctive means of the metamorphosis for the individual:

Fatigued, I settled into my seat, and dozed. Sometime later I was awakened by the

train‟s jerking motion, the clack-clack-clack of the wheels over the steel rails, the

soft sound of the rhythmic hand-clapping, and the melancholy, quavering lilts of

flamenco singing. I sat up and stared. The lights had been dimmed. The baby was

sleeping in its mother‟s arms. The five women were singing and I felt enclosed in

a warm, cozy dream. Smiling, I leaned forward and nodded affirmatively to show

207

my appreciation. The two men slept or pretended to. The women saw that I loved

their singing and they smiled. (PS 156-57)

The space of the train recalls the unchartered territory of Spain‟s geography. When

Wright boards into the train, space turns mobile and dizzy and always in flux. The articulation of this space is “at once transitional, affirmative, often uneasy, and at times immobilizing, but always transformational” (Reuman 13). Wright‟s description is an in-flux space, one that is, to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, “smooth, marked only by „traits‟ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory,” as opposed to a sedentary space, which is “striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures” (381). Even with Wright‟s incapability to speak Spanish, the women and Wright find a way to converse with one another. The scene is very exceptional as a moment of encounter because, despite cultural, gender, and language differences, Wright faces an instance of cultural closeness with the women on the train. It happens through the conduit of flamenco carried out by the voice of a woman. If Wright is focused on creating a cartography of agony, flamenco is extremely relevant to his capacity to read the suffering that flows as a thread through the culture of Franco‟s Spain, much in the same manner that the bars of the sorrow songs positioned at the head of each chapter in Souls of Black Folk function as crucial for DuBois‟ reading of African-American culture. DuBois juxtaposes the sorrow songs with lines from

Romantic and European poetry, which would appear to advise a certain equality between the two as cultural objects that become deserving of study when one acknowledges that they are key elements of the cultures in question, or possibly items of interpretation that depend on what

DuBois possibly observed as the commonalities of human experience.

208

Wright‟s experience with Senora Flamenco highlight the lingual boundaries that it attempts to transcend. Even as a unified and unifying , English carries the traces of the United States‟ internal multilingualism and those of that multilingualism‟s transnational ties. As Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrated, “two myths perish simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes to be the only language, and the myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified” (Bakhtin 68). Because the statistically engineered

Anglophone nation does not reflect the multilingual complexity of the United States, the very fiction of monolingual national identity requires the constant use of translation, between and within languages. What Wright and Senora Flamenco suggest is that to abolish the shortsightedness of transnational turn, literature should be read beyond the geo-political confines of the nation state. Wright only becomes proficient at figuring out the aural text of the flamenco in Spanish when Senora Flamenco provides him a parallel English-Spanish version of the songs being performed. Certainly, the side-by-side versions of the songs in this parallel text serve the same function as the side-by-side versions of the classical European poetry and African-

American songs in Souls: the sorrow of the songs appear to go beyond their meaning in Spanish or English. The other unremarked parallel text to the flamenco songs sung by the women in this account is the of African-American women. Baldwin, Ellison, and Wright himself had asserted the important impact of the blues on the content and form of his work, so certainly he was familiar with the blues. Wright transcribes as a whole a flamenco lyric:

Tell the Lord Mayor

Tell the Magistrate

That due to Luis Candelas

I am dying of love.

209

Tell them he is a scoundrel

Tell them that he‟s a thief

And that I allowed him

With pleasure to break my heart.

I want this love song

To pass from mouth to mouth

Just as if I were crazy. (PS 158)

The flamenco‟s principal themes, the statement of the woman‟s wish for Luis Candelas, the woman‟s sadness over her lover‟s desertion of her, and her readiness to reveal her personal hardship in an exceedingly public way are a few of the same concepts that define the vernacular type of women‟s blues. Wright‟s experience signifies not only an engagement in Spain, but also a fascination with the feminine, which the decidedly unguarded tone of Wright in this scene would appear to suggest is an “authentic” view of the culture for him: a moment of genuine consideration of the Spanish culture. Wright‟s original motives was to discover the true nature of freedom in Spain that had gone undercover in the existence of totalitarianism. That quality is here within the train. Indeed, as Ulf Hannerz points out, there is “a certain irony in the tendency of the term „transnational‟ to draw attention to what it negates—that is to the continued significance of the national” (7). The point is that transnationalism must be examined in conjunction with nationalism, along with the limiting pressures and restrictions of real-world material and political conditions. Wright‟s Pagan Spain does that. His bafflment alienation ends with a surrendering of his place within the transnational community of Spain, in favor of a renewed commitment to the international traditions of humanism, and his embrace of a renewed sense of Americanness. With the introduction of this single, quintessentially American

210 memories, Wright finally feels he is able to end his homelessness, develop roots, and make peace with his past. John Carlos Rowe has pointed out the importance of perceiving American literature in light of the diasporic consequences and multilingual contexts (72). Thoughtful of the created nature of national myths, Wright is aware of the necessity for rational perspectives that locate United States cultures in a transnational framework.

III. Pagan Spain and Wright’s Transnational, Transracial, and Universal Worldview

The controversy of Wright‟s transnational outlook continues when he describes the corruption in Spain. Another aspect of the national regime in Spain is the corruption of the

Catholic religious institution that is related to symbols and practices that kept the Spaniards trapped in the past and incapacitated in a continent that represents the dawn of Enlightenment. In order to distance himself from Franco‟s regime and create links with Spanish people, Wright begins his narrative on Spain by establishing connections with essential elements of Spanish culture. As a traveler in Pagan Spain, Wright presents himself to Spaniards as a non-religious and open-minded viewer as they guide him to different religious places and explain to him the existing financial and political circumstances of Spain. In so doing Wright illustrates the futility of the religious and political systems predominant in Spain. Bhabha‟s explanation of progress corresponds to that of Wright‟s. Bhabha describes how people can progress towards modernity:

“The movement of political power beyond the blindness of Ideology or the insight of Idea, brings

… liminality of modern society” (Nation and Narration 297). In a similar manner, Pagan Spain affirms Wright‟s desires as a writer to challenge a people‟s reliance upon what he sees as abstract and useless symbols. These rituals are not only abstract but are wedded to emotions and even deviancies that divert and maintain the fear, shame, and anxiety he considers to be so widespread

211 in Spain following the Civil War. Additionally, the travelogue comments on factors that Wright views as making up the Spanish identity.

Wright wants the chapter “Life After Death” to be an ironic account of the difference he encounters between “official Spain” and “human Spain,” and the contradictory feelings of pride and shame this generates in the citizens. He translates “official Spain” (PS 66) as symbolized by the explicit link between Catholic monuments, Falangist catechisms, and eventually to fascism.

“Human Spain” (PS 66) was the existing reality beneath the “poverty, fear, prostitution, illiteracy

[that was] but half a mile away from the bishop‟s rotting body in the glass coffin” (PS 21-22).

Wright‟s use of the Falange handbook for young women was an outstanding way of revealing the suppressive potential of Franco‟s regime against the human aspects of Spain. Wright explains how his atheism provided his Spanish guides a feeling of functionality as he was brought to the deceased bishop‟s body just like a

heathen and these devout boys were graciously coming to my rescue.

In their spontaneous embrace of me they were acting out a role that

had been implanted in them since childhood. I was not only a

stranger, but a „lost‟ one in dire need of being saved. Yet there was

no condescension in their manner; they acted with the quiet

assurance of men who knew that they had the only truth in existence

and they were offering it to me. (PS 9)

Conversely, this peaceful confidence in the existence of a decaying body inside a dark chapel was a rejection of the self-conscious disgrace, and tension Wright has are collective feelings of the Spain he experienced. The defeat of the Republic had eventually left “memories of violence

212 and horror lived on and kindled mental and emotional pain” (PS 55) although the Spanish Civil

War was over for eighteen years. Spanish traditions and practices were foisted onto the public by a fascist government. The people themselves became precariously relying on these religious and patriotic catechisms to stand in for the need for democratic improvement forfeited following the war.

Wright‟s explanation for Spain‟s underdevelopment follows his explanation for the Gold

Coast‟s deterioration. He draws attention to the tenacity of tradition, preserving that the imperial strength of Britain is substituted with a firmly national tyranny. Without a doubt, Wright‟s examination of Spanish religion offers the book‟s title and proposes that Spain is not so much

Catholic than pagan; another passage blames specifically Spain‟s underdevelopment on

Catholicism (PS 178-79). The stories are congruent insofar as Wright stresses the persistence of unreasonable tradition and superstition, held in place by an oppressive state. Like Black Power‟s criticism of African ancestor-worship, Pagan Spain proposes that Catholicism (tinged with pagan mysticism) tends to make Spaniards feeble in front of the forces of nature. Margaret

Walker notes that Wright along with African religion “was adamant against all religious faiths”

(231). In Wright‟s view, Catholics embrace a passive approach toward the world, “a mood of surrender before what they felt to be the Supreme Consciousness of the universe … the Catholic remained static, frozen, as it were, the victim of a spell cast upon him by an external configuration of fetish objects that coerced his emotions to unchangeableness.” According to

Wright, the qualities of Spanish life are a direct reflection of this “thick, sacred glass”: “low standards of living, illiteracy, no control over material forces, and a charged, confused consciousness” (PS 227). Catholicism, in Franco Spain, was lacking in the attributes of a genuine religious institution. Relatively the Church was a corrupt façade to a totalitarian regime.

213

On the other hand, it appears that Pagan Spain‟s consideration of Protestant culture is largely congruent with submission which has the potential to show its weakness:

To a Catholic all the hierarchy of Christianity was external, unspeakably

beautiful, powerful, and yet miraculously accessible through the intercession

of others … To the Protestant, however, the whole approach and process had been

psychologically internalized … The Protestant made severe demands upon

himself; the Catholic submitted to what had already been arranged…The

Protestant, therefore, could be dynamic, could project into his environment his

sense of what he felt, could act and live out his feelings, could create his sense

of God out of the worldliness of the world. Hence America, England,

Switzerland, and large parts of Protestant Scandinavia had been transformed by

Protestant pressure molding the environment; had higher standards of living,

more health, more literacy, more industry-- all stemming from the Protestant‟s

ability to handle the material of his environment with a high degree of self-

responsibility. (PS 226-27)

For Wright, this Protestant culture produces Westernness itself, even though significantly, he proposes that this kind of Westernness is now purely a human heritage which is no more geographically limited to Europe or the United States. Pagan Spain‟s examination accords with White Man, Listen! where Wright proposes that Protestantism had become secularized, giving birth to modes of thinking and institutions that were not racially specific.

“Determined to plant the religious impulse in each individual‟s heart, declaring that each man could stand face to face with God, Calvin and Luther blindly let loose mental and emotional

214 forces which, in turn, caused a vast revolution in the social, cultural, governmental, and economic conditions under which Western man lived—a revolution that finally negated their own racial attitudes!” (“Tradition and Industrialization” 90). Again, although Wright engaged with the horrors of slavery, he did not believe that slavery compromised modernity‟s promise meaning that slavery granted the concealed foundation for the West‟s phony promises of universalism. Wright immediately stands against this viewpoint when he states: “A Church world was transformed into a worldly world, any man‟s world, a world in which even black, brown, and yellow men could have the possibility to live and breathe” (“Tradition and

Industrialization” 91). This consideration on the Protestant ethic‟s secularization of universal perceptions and institutions aids to shed light on the way that Wright‟s “tragic elite” leaders may differ from fascists like Franco, or from the semi-fascist that the historical Nkrumah unfortunately grew to be.

Wright is convinced that the pairing of traditional religion with modern statecraft was what created Spain so tyrannous and backward. Alternatively, as noted in Black Power, the detrimental power of English imperialism, even though it cynically urged the endurance of tribal superstition, nevertheless destabilized African tradition, giving Africans a historically distinctive chance to remake themselves in agreement with logical principles. Evidently this is why Wright criticized “politics plus” (BP 56) so deliberately: eventually, Nkrumah would turn into Franco.

Wright‟s extensive reasoning brings him to deduce that the prospect of human freedom in Africa is far greater than that in Spain. His overview of this historical situation denies all biological details for the cultural variation; instead, he focuses on the way culture interacts with politics to preserve underdevelopment. The passage also is intended to round off Wright‟s approach to developing Spain:

215

Since I now felt most strongly, in fact, knew that Spain was not a

Western nation, what, then, did being Western mean? …Was being Western

something so absolutely different from Spanish life and civilization as to be of

another genus? … I was finally led to believe that that difference lay in the area

of the secular that Western man, through the centuries and at tragic cost, had

won and wrung from his own religious and irrational consciousness. In Spain

there was no lay, no secular life. Spain was a holy nation, a sacred State- a state

as sacred and as irrational as the sacred State of the Akan in the African jungle.

Even the prostitution, the corruption, the economics, the politics had about them

a sacred aura. All was religion in Spain. When I arrived at that conclusion, still

another and bleaker conclusion thrust itself upon me, became deductively

mandatory. The traditions of the Akan African were unwritten, were fragile, and

had already been mortally jolted by a brutal and thoughtless impact of the

Western world. The African, though thrashing about in a void, was free to create a

future; but the pagan traditions of Spain had sustained no such mortal wound.

Those traditions were intact today as never before. In fact, they were officially

revered and honoured; they were the political aims of the State. This was a fact

that made me feel that the naked African in the bush would make greater progress

during the next fifty years than the proud, tradition-bound Spaniard. (PS 192-93)

Like Black Power, Pagan Spain spends too much effort accusing the sufferer, as Wright places more force on Spain‟s cultural inadequacies than on the international impact that held Franco in power. Occasionally, his representation of Spanish irrationalism traverses into the gratuitous:

“No people on earth so pet and spoil their young as do the Spanish. Hence, if a woman in later

216 years sells her body to feed her hungry children, that in itself is almost a justification of what she is doing” (PS 152).

On the other hand, one might condemn Pagan Spain for undervaluing the durability of oppressed people, whom Wright stigmatizes in a manner that is much more intense than anything associated with Black Power. Nonetheless, one must admit the outstanding truth of a black writer in the 1950s demeaning Spain, which he has proclaimed as “white,” in such robust terms.

As Burgass points out, “[w]e must transform both society and ourselves by breaking down the false boundaries within ourselves” (135). The critical discourse on religion and poverty that

Wright uses in Africa is identical to the one that he has developed in Europe. In other words, the question that Wright basically traversed the world in an unsuccessful investigation for home, implementing pre-made explanations of oppressed peoples—Africanizing Africans,

Hispanicizing Hispanics—is diminishing in perspective. Its partial truth obscures the race-free model of individual power and social advancement that Wright endorsed to transform both our society as well as ourselves.

One of Wright‟s major findings is that what crushes human route in Spain is the Catholic notion of sin: “Sin exists, so declares this concept. Prostitution is sin, and proof of sin. So prostitution exists. To account for prostitution in economic and political terms is to be accountable for more sin” (PS 152). Fabre observes that in Pagan Spain, Wright articulates the fundamental tyranny of religion: “[T]he relationship between superstition and faith, and instinct and spirituality, in this Catholic universe tyrannized over by a religion whose roots were buried so deep in sexuality and the subconscious that he considered himself justified in speaking of a

„pagan‟ Spain” (UQ 414). As Wright confirms, “this universal prostitution is not something to be

217 grappled with in terms of social or economic engineering” (PS 152). Where this problem is concerned, there is no room for reason and pragmatic problem-solving. Nor is there space for the best consumers and producers of reason and practicality: totally free people. Since all, including social class, is as if preordained and located in place by sin, “the concept of citizen does not exist in the Spanish mind and the reality of the citizen does not exist in Spanish life—that free, sovereign, responsible, self-moving man or woman whose inspired functions created the Western industrialized world ” (PS 152). In this Spain where no person has citizenship; that is no one seems to participate in the making of his or her political destiny. Wright deals with many of his religious kin: individuals who, like himself, are essentially stateless, though struggling to avoid the influence of nationalism. Normally what Wright honors in Pagan Spain are those who, like

Carmen, avoid the annihilating inclinations of unexamined tradition and negligent state authority. The problem in Spain requires bringing out the minds from the hegemony of the

Church and Franco regime.

Yet it is apparent in these pages, more than in the ones from the Africa book, that he himself is the embodiment of the “free, sovereign, self-moving man.” At every point, what is highlighted in his self-portraiture is his exercise of freedom—a strategy that can make the relative deficiency of freedom of the Spaniards among whom he travels rather more poignant, even tragic. Wright‟s feeling of absolute comfort and self-realization in this part, his unmentioned problems with the U.S. government notwithstanding, makes Pagan Spain possibly his most peaceful book.

For once, he feels no reason to protect himself against immediate risks. Without doubt, a portion of his convenience is due to his conclusion that the Spaniards he confronts have “no

218 racial consciousness whatsoever” (PS 11). For once he can simply be an author, even the writer,

Carmen offers him the green book with the declaration, “People ought to know how we live here” (PS 18). In his remarkable fashion, Wright followed the command to look, pass on, and report on what has been observed, judging it openly based on beliefs he and his ideal target audience share that Spain was not of the West:

I was a part, intimate and inseparable, of the Western world, but

I seldom had to account for my Westerness, had rarely found myself

in situations which challenged me to do so … Even in Asia and Africa

I had always known where my world ended and where theirs began.

But Spain was baffling … [W]hat then did being Western mean? . . .

I was finally led to believe that the difference lay in the area of the secular

that Western man, through the centuries and at tragic cost, had won and

wrung from his own religious and irrational consciousness . . .

True, the West had its areas of the irrational: Germany and Italy had

only recently been rescued from a bloody Sargasso of the irrational

and were still in a period of convalescence. But, in the West as a whole,

a substantial margin of the secular, strategically anchored in science,

industry, and in daily lives of hundreds of millions of citizens, had been

won and it was safe to assume that those margins would not only remain,

but would be, and were daily being, enlarged, extended. (PS 192,194)

There is not any question that a fundamental factor of Wright‟s vision as an author is to be involved in stretching out these margins, and that when he grows strident, as on occasion he does

219 in Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain, it is because he temporarily despairs of advancing them, and even worries he might lose the battle and be confused by a tidal influx of unreason. Consequently, the care he adopts in not only determining his identity, but in revealing its exact relation to its immediate surroundings: “The first thing, though, that I had to be clear about was my own deep non-Catholicness, my undeniable and inescapable Protestant background and conditioning, my irredeemably secular attitude, and, beyond all that, my temperamental inability to accept childlike explanations of a universe” (PS 231). For this secular,

Protestant Wright, the Catholic sacredness that is inherent to Spain is a type of cancerous growth that must ultimately prove deadly if it is not removed. Being of numerous contradictions,

Miguel, whom Wright could very well have realized unsympathetic, does not basically disagree with Wright‟s opinion of Spain as a “holy nation” (PS 192). Yet for the philosopher Miguel, a

Spaniard whose craving to establish and shield his identity appears to have been even more powerful than Wright‟s, the ever-present Spanish religiosity would probably be a thing to glory within.

Spain, for Wright, is the perfect example of the West, the unreasonable, conquering, at times rapacious West. Thus, Wright‟s subject is greater than it at first seems. The Spain he provides is alone divided between its cunning Fascist dictators, and what Wright shows as its enthusiastic, long-suffering and, most importantly, religious people. The Spain of the conquerors in Wright‟s consideration takes the shape of a green book offered him by a young Spanish woman whose potential future is dependent on learning it. It turns out to become a political catechism that for Wright is apparently “the mouth, at the veritable fount of Western history” (PS

24). He comes to this conclusion, after reading through the book‟s first lesson, that it is the

“DESTINY” of Spain to “include all men in a common movement for salvation,” and to ensure

220 that “all men place spiritual values before material” (PS 23). The lesson tells him, too, that Spain will accomplish this success by “the influence it exercises over other nations and also by conquest” (PS 23). Here, clearly, is the sort of spirituality-a messianic spirituality-that Wright most disfavors. The Spain he prefers, alternatively, is epitomized by people like Carmen, the young pension attendant who gives him the political catechism, which is titled Formacion

Politica: Lecciones para las Flechas. The volume itself “dealt with aims and principles of the

Franco regime and was in the simple form of questions and answers” (PS 13). Carmen tells

Wright that he does not “know what it means to be a girl in Spain … I‟m supposed to stay home and have babies” (PS 16). She wishes she were a man because “[t]hey can do as they like … I‟m twenty-five, I earn my living. Yet I can‟t go out at night” (PS 16). When Wright requests a clarification, she affirms, “[w]e‟re Catholic” (PS 17). She studies her political catechism, she informs him, not because she believes what she reads, but because she ought to understand it as a way to be eligible for a social service post that would ultimately enable her to abandon Spain.

As a result, Wright‟s processing, in the course of Pagan Spain, of entire parts of the catechism Franco‟s government prepared for schoolgirls is not only a means of demonstrating to the world a fantastic brainwashing apparatus. It is also an imitation of a formal surviving strategy that is a very sensible approval for the official termination of the free, erring, illogical, corrupt, and “human quality” of everyday life. The catechism is in a sense the anti-text against which

Wright‟s text is composed. But as an anti-text it undoubtedly goes into a dialectical connection with Wright‟s words and phrases. It signifies the “veritable fount of Western history” (PS 24).

Because of this relationship it is simply the unpredictable nature where Wright has foraged, sharpened his abilities, and crafted his tools. Ultimately, Spain pushes him close to the fluctuation of perspective, and he ought to accept, nonetheless obliquely, the common origins of

221 the secular Westernness he prefers and the pagan irrationality he perceives epitomized in the catechism and Spanish religiosity. He concedes that

[a]ll of it, Christianity and Communism, had come from one (and perhaps)

unrepealable historical accident that had been compounded in Rome from

Greek science and love of the human personality, from Jewish notions of

the One and Indivisible God, from Roman conceptions of law and order

and property, and from a perhaps never-to-be-unraveled amalgamation of

Eastern and African religions with their endless gods who were sacrificed

and their virgins who gave birth perennially. (PS 240)

In writing all of this, Wright attempts to part the wheat of time from the chaff to separate science, appreciation for the human character, Roman concepts of law, order and property from the

“endless gods who were sacrificed” (PS 240). He does not want, above all, the sort of personality he sees being born in the post-colonial world the sort of personality he exemplifies-being sacrificed on the altar of the past.

Moreover, Michel Fabre states that Wright continued to be all of his life “very much a humanist,” and he emblematizes Wright‟s reasonable role on “how to inject a personal philosophy into Marxist theory; how to restore morality to political action; and how to save mankind from . . . destruction through the reactivation of humanistic values” (World of Richard

Wright 159). For this reason, it becomes essential for Wright to focus on the hazardous face of fascist nationalist historiography and resist it with his humanist transnational manifestation of the universe. Wright‟s thoughts appraise the distance and the threat, and time and again, he

222 considers the distance until it is reduced to what for him is the fundamental division: the gap between reason and irrationality as tools for dealing with and controlling risk.

Wright‟s Pagan Spain, as his Black Power and The Color Curtain, was more experimental and visionary than furious, and the challenges he experienced are frequently modern. These travel stories, according to his trips to Africa, to Indonesia and to Franco‟s Spain, investigate the basis of Western civilization and the place within it of racial discrimination, religion colonialism and irrationalism (Rowley, “Intellectual Exile” 305). Being an American author in Europe, he was remarkably inspired to manage extensive questions about identity, oppression, and modernity versus irrationalism. Rowley stressed that Pagan Spain, like Black

Power and The Color Curtain, is commencing to be viewed as “complex, engaging writing of an enquiring mind, rather than the „mere journalism‟ they were dismissed as being at the time they first appeared” (“Intellectual Exile” 306).

Wright treatment of bullfighting, for example, exhibits his experienced comprehension of world difficulties in a competent literary manner. Bullfighting is a metaphoric portrayal of the religious and socio-political life in Spain. Hakutani demonstrates this meaning about the worth of bullfighting in Pagan Spain when he highlights the deeper interpretation of this vicious ritual

“smacks of the central paradox of the Spanish religion” (“Pagan Spain Cross-Cultural

Discourse” 52). Bullfighting connotes the Spanish battle for survival in an arena of imminent death; the bull here is the barbaric power of hegemony and persecution up against the rational fighter. This event shows the Spanish everyday life of conflict against tyranny. No matter how long the uncontrollable power of corruption manages to traverses the bullfighter‟s expectations, there ought to be a rationally arranged strategy to finish this power of backwardness. An

223 essential moment in this encounter occurs when the audience move from their seats to participate in finishing the bull; they stand up against oppression and take a productive part in this process.

Wright, in his manifestation of bullfighting, stresses that Spain needs rational fighters for freedom and advancement.

This representation turns obvious in the section of Pagan Spain called “Death and

Exaltation.” At the climax of that section, Wright superbly explains a bullfight and its ritual enactment of the central drama of human life: the drama of the confrontation with risk and the questions it raises about success for a lifetime at the individual level and, at the group level, for survival through the course of evolution. Wright tells us the “bull had been so tended, fed, supervised, that he was beautifully, wonderfully, innocently, and miraculously bad, evil, ungovernable-the hallucinatory image of the undistracted lust to kill” (PS 98). The “black bull” is like the controlling system in Spain that manipulates the fortunes of the country for their benefit and becomes greedy every day. Nevertheless, Franco‟s growing regime worked on maintaining its position by confiscating the Spaniards‟ freedom and prosperity; this totalitarian regime employed oppression to maintain its control of the Spaniards.

In addition, Michel Fabre asserted that Wright‟s account of the bullfight is similar to

Hemingway‟s best descriptions (UQ 415). Wright‟s description of the same moment of confrontation is outstanding. He writes:

Chamaco‟s left hand now grasped the muleta firmly; he turned

away from the bull, looking at him sideways, letting the red cloth

drop below his left knee. He now lifted his gleaming sword chin high

and sighted along the length of it, pointing its sharp, steel tip at the

224

tormented and bloody mound of wounds on the bull‟s back. Chamaco‟s

left hand twitched the cloth, citing the bull. The bull saw it and charged.

Chamaco charged, meeting the bull. (PS 111-112)

Wright‟s addition of “the tormented and bloody mound of wounds on the bull‟s back” indicates the main manner in which his consideration of the bullfight is different from that of his literary predecessor. Unquestionably, Wright‟s focus in the outline of the bullfight is on the sociological and pathological measurements of the ritual for its participants. Along with embodying bullfight as being a daring act in the Spanish life, Wright asserts that bullfight displays a “man-made agony to assuage the emotional needs of men” (PS 112). Wright draws attention to the brave portrayal of the matador, and he desired to comprehend why and how this quality operated in the thoughts of an oppressed people. Ultimately, Wright links his past experiences with the awareness that Western hemisphere travels had provided him with Europe. This meaning to the bullfight is not unexpected to anyone acquainted with his works. But by addressing this subject,

Wright declared his position and unique contribution to the American literary tradition.

As a reporter of the bullfight, Wright is enthralled by the actions and movements of the bull, the black bull. He presents the bull to the reader almost as much as an author of fantasy may portray a fantastic monster. He states:

Then out thundered a wild, black, horned beast, his eyes ablaze, his

nostrils quivering, his mouth open and flinging foam, his throat

emitting a bellow. He halted for a second, amazed, it seemed, at the

spectacle confronting him, then he settled squarely and fearlessly on

four hoofs, ready to lower his head and charge at the least sign of

225

movement, his sharp horns carrying the threat of death, his furious

tenacity swollen with a will that would brook no turning aside until

all movement about him had been struck down, stilled, and he alone

was left lord and master of the bloody field. (PS 96)

Through this passage, Wright is initially expounding on an outrageous beast moving into an arena confident of his strength and dominance. Nonetheless, the animal changes into a terrified and captured carnival performer, unaware of his situation as prey. Wright‟s vibrant expressions further stress the mindset of a crowd watching the bull as a villainous actor who is contrary to their hero, the bullfighter, a savage, unrestrainable black villain who is pitted against their champion in a lighted uniform.

One of the most stimulating characterizations of the bull created by Wright articulates

Ellison‟s discussion in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” on the connection between the black minstrel and early white American audiences. Ellison details the audience‟s interplay with the minstrel as a “ritual of exorcism” (23) or a cathartic discharge through which white audience members can have their racial misperceptions and feeling of cultural prominence strengthened, guilt free, all within the guise of sense of humor. In accordance with Wright, for the Spanish gathered to watch the bullfight, the bull became a “compliment of a subjective part of everyone in the stadium ... a creature of our common fantasy, projected puppet of our collective hearts and brains, a savage proxy offered by us to ourselves to appease the warring claims that our instincts were heir to” (PS 97).

Ellison also argues in his essay that one of the reasons for the minstrel‟s blackness is that it permits the white actor and his target audience to prevent or hide their connection with the

226 subject of their ridicule, to avert similarity with his “disorder and chaos,” and as Americans, to additionally eradicate themselves from their concern about becoming a people without “past or tradition” (Ellison, Shadow and Act 54). Each author affiliates color with performers who are fixed expressions of savagery and deterioration. This position enables a distanced audience to vicariously yet easily encounter fear, terror, and tragic humor, all while being confident by thoughts of superiority.

Furthermore, the detailed description of the “black bull” (PS 97) spotlight a turning point in his profession as an American author. Wright is not anymore introducing the black character as oppressed figure that sparks the sympathy of the readers and audience. In line with Wallach,

Wright confesses that when he speculates his earlier writing, he feels that he has done an

“awfully naive mistake” (71). Wright summarized this fault by writing his stories with black protagonists who were dehumanized and persecuted by a racist society (Wallach 71). Thus, in explaining the bullfighting, Wright appears to be “reversing roles” (Kinnamon and Fabre,

Conversations 203). The “black bull” here is a portrayal of the hegemonic power that prospered by manipulating the Spanish people‟s assets and lives. To the audience, its fatality is the supreme objective that will liberate them from long battling and oppression. Through this astute representation, Wright has altered his past style of depicting the color “black” as the persecuted subject of sympathy. Wright‟s transnational experience helped him redefine himself, and in an essential sense transformed his interpretation of the world.

Wright‟s own curiosity about the bull is further depending on the audience‟s attitude toward the animal. Wright acknowledges that “There was no doubt that this beast had to be killed! And that crashing hump of a black bull they had sworn to kill was deeply loved; no

227 mistake about that” (PS 97). Though the crowd had amassed there to observe the bull‟s collapse, a substantial amount of expertise and attention had gone into preserving the bull‟s physical health so that he was “beautifully, wonderfully, innocently, and miraculously bad, evil, ungovernable—the hallucinatory image of the undistracted lust to kill” (PS 98). As a result, what is important is not the animal but the damaging impulse and forceful volatility carefully developed in his genes. This bull‟s breeding process parallels the harmful impulse to get rid of the closest people who were taking proper care of him. For this reason, Wright‟s purpose is to enunciate the way the political regime in Spain obtained its oppressive strength and used it against the Spaniards.

When going over the training techniques of the bull, Wright says that “the beast had to be educated quickly so that he could serve human ends, human purposes ... Death must serve as a secular baptism of emotion to wash the heart clean of its illegal dirt”(PS 99). When thinking about the impact that this picture can have on his large audience, one thinks about whether

Wright as an artist is creating a comparable type of “secular baptism” or guilt washing catharsis in his contemporary audience. Wright may seem to infuse the drive for fighting off oppression and beating predominant corrupt forces in defense of people‟s right to freedom, equality and self-worth irrespective of their racial, cultural, and national affiliation.

Wright takes the bullfight viewers as an imperative part of the scene whose approach demonstrates the greater components of the Spanish personality. In conversation with a bullfighter, Wright is informed that “[b]ulls don‟t kill bullfighters. It‟s the public clamoring for danger. More and more, when you‟re in the ring, you‟re not fighting the bull; you‟re trying to live up to the legend the public has built up about you.” (PS 131). The bullfighter is required by

228 his viewers to continually do his best, meaning the constant maintenance of dignity with no demonstration of dread inside the ring. Wright sees the bullfight viewers as dynamic contributors in a pagan practice which lets them participate, exchange, and even solve deeply sensed feelings regarding death.

Wright ends it as the Spanish example of capability coupled with a need for self-realization and independence that produces shame and anxiety in the bullfight audience. This is conveyed in a stressful and joint pursuit for removing the bull‟s testicles:

The crowd went straight to the dead bull‟s testicles and began

kicking them, stomping them, spitting at them, grinding them under

their heels, while their eyes held a glazed and excited look of sadism

… One would have had to be psychologically blind to miss the meaning

of that. They went straight to the real object on that dead bull‟s body

that the bull had symbolized for them and poured out the hate and

frustration and bewilderment of their troubled and confused

consciousness. (PS 134-35)

The bull is a conscious object of projection for collective emotions of suffering, confusion, and anger. Wright depicts the bullfight crowd as a mob involved in a liberating objective against their emblematic oppressor. The dismembered body of the bull is as an enlightening instrument on collective behaviors. The audience assault of the deceased bull mirrors “venting long-repressed emotions” (Hakutani, “Pagan Spain Cross-Cultural Discourse” 53). This assertion signifies

Wright‟s primary response to Spain and the mindset that guides and shows the results he developed while there. Pagan Spain is an investigation of the outcomes of economic blight on a

229 nation and innocent people who are worthy of independence and self-respect. Wright assumes a permit to get involved in his fiction and nonfiction because his consistent aim across both types of writing is to produce feelings of revulsion and repugnance toward circumstances he judges to be morally corrupt and oppressive. Pagan Spain is an insightful political tract that attempts to enlighten and affect our views of Spain‟s moral problem in the early 1950s. Wright‟s manifestation of the bull‟s movement through the early phases of the bullfight is probably Pagan

Spain‟s most unforgettable excerpt since he is storytelling an important aspect of the Spanish culture.

Pagan Spain unveils that the situation in Spain is founded on the connection to totalitarianism or a relation to forces of authority, being oppressed or made other in one‟s home.

This permits Wright to reconfigure the inherited world map a perception that assists us manage and form our comprehension of oppression in different parts of the world in such a way that may surprise us and allows us to have an approach by which to visualize new coalitions. Such alliances or coalitions, specifically as an oppositional politics, are not necessarily straightforward to attain. At the outset of his travelogue, Wright examines his notion about the consequences of tyranny on most people, the sorts of reactions it often brings about:

I had long believed that where you found tyranny, such as exists in Russia,

you would also find a confounding freedom secreted somewhere; that where

you had a stifling bureaucracy, such as in France, there was a redeeming

element of personal liberty; that where you had a police state such as was in

Argentina, you had under it, disguised, a warm comradeship; and that where

you had a restrained or reserved attitude, such as in England, you had

230

somewhere nearby, equalizing it, a licentious impulse to expression. (PS 12)

These actions, to Wright, depict different types of consistent reactions to oppression. Hence, he wonders if this describes the situation also in Spain. As he runs into people all the way through

Spain, he looks for their consistent reaction to their circumstances, towards the dictatorship of

Franco and the principles that came with it. However, he appears incapable to identify such a reaction. He encounters people whose reactions to tyranny differ significantly, including both the rebellious and the bitter, separatists, and the devout. With that been said, Wright was the first black author who “wrote for white readers, [and] who mixed with progressive white intellectuals” (Rowley, “Intellectual Exile” 307). By stepping into this arena, Wright supports his position in mainstream American literature.

In his fiction, Wright does not enable the past to control his present and future. Instead through his autobiographical growing, he permits the past to rejuvenate the present. In the life of the Spanish in Pagan Spain and the life of the Africans in Black Power, Wright finds religion and racial and cultural connection to be hindering elements in the development of the people.

This scenario supports Wright‟s intimation in the subsequent quotation that one's racial knowledge is an embodiment of worldwide experience:

In the United States, the tendency is to tell black writers:

“Don't be preoccupied with your experience as Negroes.

Don‟t be polarized by it. You are people. Write exactly

as any other people would do on any other subject.”

I would be inclined to tell them, “On the contrary,

take your ghetto experience as a theme, for this precisely

231

is a universal topic.” (qtd. in Kinnamon and Fabre, Conversations 205)

The past is a vital factor in one‟s personality, but a writer should not stop there. The past should be a place to begin to improve the present and the future in the direction of a universal, transnational, and transracial worldview. If a Spaniard‟s experience is also a universal experience, then a Spaniard's experience must also relate to an African‟s, Asian‟s, and African

American‟s experiences since they are all congruent to a global experience. In addition, in line with Wright, oppression is not the destiny of only black people. It is the fate of all people who lack will and persistence. Oppression is almost everywhere and could be experienced on Black,

White, Brown, and Yellow people of racial, national and cultural backgrounds. Wherever, a people have such manipulative conditions, they should stand up and face it with steadfast perseverance. Otherwise, they will be destroyed and shredded by merciless “bulls.”

Wright handles simultaneously to draw the circumstances of Western flexibility after modernity. Spain‟s landscape is outlined as the place of Wright‟s personal wanderings through his familiarity with the devastations of the civil war. In Wright‟s explanation the insights that he holds with him is of the horrors of European war and racism in Mississippi, an understanding that turns into a metaphysical barrier to his potential to cross the border, one that is self-imposed.

Wright tries to avoid bringing memories “while roaming a land whose free men had been shut in concentration camps, or exiled, or slain” (PS 2). He does not want to understand the real scenery of Spain since it is haunted by the restriction as well as oppression, the possible lack of mobility.

Wright‟s insertion of himself as a free man guiltily roaming through that unfree landscape that he had dealt with textually is extremely an element of Western representations of itself after modernity.

232

Contemplating the body in which Wright traverses and the toiling history of Spain what precipitates the fall into modernity is not the Middle Passage or slavery but the familiarity with a wholesale infringement of human life in a European site instead of the wipe off of the abuse of human life on the African or Asian ends of middle passages. Wright has drawn a modem Europe, one in which such violence may appear “here,” and one in which the comprehension of such offenses is not a thing that a Westerner bears from abroad and fetch homes to West. The brutality is previously there in advance of him, so there is not any uncovering to make in this landscape.

Wright‟s portrayal of Spain as a European space and of himself at the border in these initial paragraphs inverts Euro-American systems of manifestation and expects modem representations of the West.

In the framework of the West‟s confinement, Wright‟s super appraisal of freedom, his denial of most obtained and unexamined categories, is seen at its most lustrous: “ „I have no religion in the formal sense of the word,‟ I told her. „I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I‟m obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I‟m free. I have only the future‟” (PS 17). Wright believes that his goal as an author is “to create a new life by intensifying the sensibilities and working towards world understanding by improving living conditions” (Fabre, UQ 203). He ended up heading toward his position as a transnational citizen of the world. In Pagan Spain and the rest of his nonfiction, he strives to sort out the important points of creating the historiography of most people. When Carmen hears, she reacts with words that Wright most likely wants almost all his readers would say: “I wish I could say that … Just to hear anyone say anything like that makes me tremble” (PS 17). Carmen‟s green book is in many ways the antitype in the book Wright wants to write. In different ways, its objectives are specifically his own. For the fascists‟ interest, as for Wright, is to “include all men

233 in a common movement for salvation” (PS 23). Wright will not point out salvation, but freedom.

Freedom is essential to him as much as salvation does to passionate humans passing away and admitting their sins.

By contrast, the fascists aspire to “[e]nsure that all men place spiritual values before material” (PS 23). Freedom, which Wright treasures extremely, is a spiritual worth, although it possesses real-world outcomes. One significant variation between Wright and the fascists is that he facilitates a substantial area for free investigation, while the fascists are such determinists that in the catechism they can solve the question “How will Spain achieve its destiny?” (PS 23) with the specified answer cited above, “[b]y the influence it exercises over other nations and also by conquest” (PS 23). It is the distance between fascist objectives and his goals, which he would call human ones, that Wright examines in Pagan Spain. For him, the most critical aspect lacking from the Spanish picture, as from the African one, is reason. What he sees as an alternative is paganism, and what impedes him about this paganism is its inability to survive up to particular

Protestant/Capitalistic ideals and outcomes. The unique result that moves him hardest is Spain‟s failure to achieve the abundance that is the fruit of the essence of capitalism. The many prostitutes he encounters working in a country dedicated to virginity, he wraps up, are created by an agonizing

muscular contraction in the empty belly known as hunger, a hunger

chronic throughout the nation … Undernourishment is universal,

blazoning itself in the tense eyes of children, announcing itself on

the wan cheeks of young women—the foundations of this hunger resting

solidly upon a surplus of more than two and one-half million farmhand.

234

a scarcity of water almost everywhere, a deficiency of fertilizers, a soil

worn out by a system of one-crop farming and ruined by erosion, primitive

methods of agriculture, a lack of power and transport, and a landscape of

rock and rubble. (PS 151)

In this community, it might appear, rules that motivate altruism are put aside. Corruption is an exceptional category of non-altruistic behavior. Wright, therefore, was a good example who has had so many of the writer par excellence—someone to whom any pursuit that did not boost the strength of the self was impossible. This type of person, obviously, is quite hazardous to others, since for him others can only be aides or obstacles to limitless hope. As John Lowe describes,

Wright would wear numerous hats, such as those of social anthropologist, historian, ethnographer, and tourist (121). Pagan Spain is also described as a “masterful piece of vigorous journalism” on the jacket blurb of the Harper & Brothers. Wright highlights that Spain is probably one of the most innovative nations, yet it appears that it is not progressive enough to rationally analyze its regressive history regardless of how problematic it may be.

The brief response to the question with which Wright starts Pagan Spain, “[h]ow [does] one live after the death of hope and freedom?,” suggests the loss of confidence and independence that exists when one is battling to resuscitate freedom, revives free action at a time, and risks it at the same time. This is the perspective of the Catalan barber Wright encounters who, feeling himself and his people oppressed and filled by the mainstream Spanish culture, tells Wright, “it‟s all one thing: the State. The Church is only a facet of it; that‟s all … Those men in Madrid go too far, too far! There will be an evening of the scores one day; understand? … Monsieur, we are patient … „We have a saying in Spain … [which] means that, though hungry, I am my own

235 master, my own dictator. It means that I do with my life what I want . . . En mi hambre mando yo‟” (PS 81-82). After some struggling, Wright translates the last sentence as “I AM THE

MASTER OF MY HUNGER.” Wright appends the subsequent remarks: “He was emperor of a bleak empire indeed. He would refuse to repress his instinct for freedom even if faced with starvation. In feet, he would take starvation and death and make them a kid of victory” (PS 83).

Wright disapproves, although in an appreciating sort of way. Like Wright, the barber tends to make freedom the axis of his world.

To sustain this particular axis and its balance and maintain the mobility of the world surrounding it, he will certainly confront any threat. And knowledge of danger is the unachievable substance of freedom. In practice, only an omniscient and all-powerful entity, in short, can fully understand and behave precisely enough to prevent all possible dangers, at the same time. Even though fundamentally it is his objective also, Wright cannot entirely to concur with the barber because he is convinced the man‟s position makes his aim extremely hard.

Wright looks for knowledge of the risk that is a logical plan as well. This significantly complicates his findings and conclusions in Pagan Spain. Nevertheless, his complicated reaction is an advancement over his occasionally simplified positions and attacks on Africa. At a higher level, his representations of those situations and the empathy he demonstrates are significantly prominent in Pagan Spain compared to Black Power, because the personal dangers to which

Wright believes himself exposed are much significantly less in Spain. Sometimes in Africa, a place with which he could be anticipated to determine, it appears that he is mainly concerned that his identity will break down in pre-modern acids. In spite of its totalitarian authority and its profound Catholicism, Spain has an adequate amount of the outward features of the West to

236 make Wright comfortable. In Africa, at one point, he longs for a sidewalk cafe. His thoughts of relative freedom from risk derive, too, from his sources of strength. Wright‟s position as a noted author and his weight as a citizen of a prominent nation with which Spain has good relationships always put him in the light of his responsibility in Spain.

Accordingly, Pagan Spain attempts to form the best way he is perceived through mindful affirmations in the text of specific principles. This perspective supports how the writer tends to be just as substantial subject as the areas he investigates. Pagan Spain is an endeavor of a particular type of purity whether political or artistic, whose objective is either shedding away the illusory interruptions of high ritual to reveal the debasing existence of hardship or viewing previous emotional and moral discomfort to recognize and reproduce an art that truthfully shows the challenges between life and death. Though this quest for integrity may lead to various rhetorical devices, the shared dedication is to allow the reader to experience tragedy vividly.

Wright endeavors to provide himself in Pagan Spain as a dependable viewer able of objective reporting and comments. His position is to blend in the text “radical individualism” with a transnational worldview: “I have no religion … I have no race except that which is forced upon me … I‟m free. I have only the future” (PS 17). Wright is relieving himself from essentialist necessities and this choice provides him with more delicate empathetic power that permits him to examine and resolve international problems.

Though Wright remarks to get into Spain with a clear cultural standing, he does get there with extensively formulated philosophical perspectives. His perceptions are mainly rational,

Western, and scientific, rendering it challenging in the eyes of one reviewer to “conceive of anyone less equipped to understand Spain. Richard Wright is the perfect model of a completely

237 secularized mentality. He is committed, more or less consciously, to some modern dogmas; rationalism, sentimental humanitarianism, sociological determinism, Freudian pan-sexualism …

There is a complete lack of awareness of, or appreciation for, anything pertaining to the supernatural” (McMahon 648, 653). Wright always views the paranormal as a suppressing diversion, but what is more attractive regarding his displays of his intellectual biography in

Pagan Spain is the expressions of his final edicts as an essential secularist.

After dispensing with Communism and existentialism in his earlier works, Wright moves to the respected resource of the modern Western world to find the primitivism he rebukes in

Africa and a fascism he associates with Jim Crow in Mississippi. Then he has reported these belief systems and ideologies are protected and approved under the umbrella of Catholicism.

Pagan Spain is Wright‟s greatest and ultimate indictment of religion, and Christianity‟s capability to occur only in connection with an imperialistic order and reliance upon pagan traditions that restrict sincere emotional expression. As Gilroy writes, “This enthusiasm for an emergent, global, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics need not be seen as a simple substitute for Wright‟s commitment to the struggles of blacks in America. He strives to link it with the black American vernacular in a number of ways” (Black Atlantic 148). Pagan Spain is an ultimate philosophical destination that records and justifies Wright‟s positive feeling of existence. Near the last part of Pagan Spain, as in The Color Curtain and Black Power, he is still preaching the need for secular humanism.

This is apparently the “write back message” which Guy Reynolds describes with regards to African-American modernist artists who “write back” to their white rivals (Reynolds 502).

What goes on once the “primitive” audience steps out and lives outside the ritual ceremony?

238

Wright ends Pagan Spain observing a moving parade of floats carrying “Dying Gods and

Sorrowful Virgins” (PS 238) and then proceeds to associate Spain‟s religious background with its existing risk:

And in Spain, where I now stood-indeed, here in this city of

Seville-Christianity, in order to survive, had had to institute with a

bloody war another form of collectivity. Beleaguered by modern

ideas, stormed by the forces of social and political progress, Spain

had had to withdraw, had had to go back into the past and find

some acceptable form of endurable life that could knit its poetic minded

people together again. The anxious freedom of capitalistic, democratic

Europe and America could not be sustained by the Spaniard.

He had rejected it as being too painful, too inhuman to bear.

The tense Western nomads, hungry for personal destiny, and,

above all, the murderous rationalism of sacrificial Communism,

had been scornfully rejected in favor of an archaic collective consciousness

based on family symbols: One Father, One Mother, One Spirit …

The Inquisition, that cold and calculating instrument of God‟s terror,

had whipped Spaniards into a semblance of outward conformity,

yet keeping intact all the muddy residue of an irrational paganism

that lurked at the bottom of the Spanish heart … How poor indeed

he is. (PS 239-242)

239

Wright‟s use of this line, “[h]e rejected it as being too painful, too inhuman to bear” (PS 240), implies considering Spain‟s break-up from the entire modern world. But his findings propose that Spain‟s detachment from modernity requires a purity unmarred by the kind of personal disappointment and discontent characterizing other areas of Europe and America.

Wright claims that either within Spain or outside of Spain there is a prevention of reality associated with an intractable anxiety and stress. “How poor indeed he is” who may either not accept death or continues to be stunted within a past that hinders scientific development. Wright, the secular transnationalist, confesses his opportunity to interact with and feel other humans and, therefore, is supportive to their requirement of fellowship and ritual and disallows any severe consideration of the long-term political ramifications of mythological beliefs. Wright is, indeed, focused on a challenge, and with solidarity that goes beyond race as well as nation. Pagan Spain exhibits how the fellowship and emotional satisfaction experienced in ritual does not essentially prevent the logical examination of society‟s present material realities. The Spaniards‟ mind and heart need to be cleared from myths that religious superstition and totalitarianism developed within. After that remedy mission, the Spanish community could operate again and proceed with the pace of Western civilization.

240

Conclusion

As an American in Europe, then as a black Westerner touring Africa, Richard Wright was significantly enthusiastic about extensive issues concerning identity, the psychology of oppression, and modernity as opposed to irrationalism. Black Power, The Color Curtain, and

Pagan Spain need to be observed for what they are: innovative, appealing writings of an enquiring mind, rather than mere journalism as they were received when first released. These travel narratives, depending on Wright‟s journeys to Africa, Indonesia, and Franco‟s Spain, are a form of transnational exploration of human character within the context of racism, religion, colonialism, and irrationalism.

What Wright‟s transnational trilogy displays is that race can be a decisive factor. Race is a determining factor because a host of other elements that inform one‟s worldview and self-image.

Race is a deciding factor that impacts the way a human comprehends power and the capability to assert or be influenced by it. Race is an element that affects the dynamics of one‟s actions especially regarding connections with those of an alternative racial background. Wright additionally lived and wrote during a period when race was a substantial determinant of class in

American life.

Rather than enabling extreme nationalist Western philosophies to deplete his transnational philosophy, Wright incorporates the two philosophies, given that he views them as revealing most of the same presumption of hope. In this manner, his cultural philosophies do not die.

However, he still maintains that they are ready to work for the good of his nation as well as for the benefit of an international setting. The primal mindset on life Wright experienced among

Africans, Asians, and Spaniards correlates with his firm belief that there is a dominance of

241 intuition over knowledge in the investigation of truth. This is what brings Wright to question the fundamental assumptions of existence, that is, questioning the life one is socially and politically conditioned to live. In his non-fiction works, Wright admonishes that for humans to genuinely see themselves they have to provide their highest consideration to understanding the essence of humanity that outshines the limitations of nations, races, religions, and cultures.

Wright arrived in Africa in 1953. In Ghana, he was impatient with African traditions and beliefs, which he considers as a hindrance to their economic and technical improvement specifically during the last days of colonialism. In Black Power, Wright discovers the ultimate lesson that “his blackness can be redeemed by service, but this service is not in the interests of his people; it's against them” (BP 234). Wright realizes that the foreseeable future of the Gold

Coast depends on constructing powerful economic and political associations with the Western world. However, the interactions he needs to build with the West as a way to support the people of the Gold Coast in their search for economic and political independence will also ruin the ancestral culture of the people, as well as take advantage of their natural resources. For that reason, any nationalistic actions on his part provide open and subtle rebukes because they jeopardize the tenuous connection the Gold Coast has with its British Imperialists.

Wright sees their firm racial hierarchies and land encroachment as interfering with his sentimental perspective of a soulful, subsistent, unchanging, and noble class of hunters. Wright‟s image of Africa is a combination of failed efforts at personal identification and held Western concepts projected onto the continent. Wright‟s Americaness is evident in his assumption of prerogative and entitlement in dealing with indigenous ethnicities. He is susceptible to projecting his restricted and idealistic perceptions onto international adjustments to extend beyond race.

242

In his transnational trilogy, Wright manages to navigate these diverse spaces with remarkable success. Eventually, he is always weaving his travels into a consistent narrative presenting resolution to a preliminary mystery; in this way, the figure of the peripatetic detective delivers a particular fantasy, a self-consciously historical construct that concerns itself with knowledge in the guise of narrative. Accounts of the same space concerned with contemporary reality present a much less inviting version of flexibility. Wright has asserted gracefully that the emerging, unresolved shadow of the transnational viewpoint has enforced itself firmly on the narrative of American national identity, and thus on the contours and shape of the literature in essential ways in which the established discourse does not acknowledge or disclose. Wright‟s later non-fiction works propose a transnational potential that should be explicated in scholarly works.

Moreover, Wright was a twofold outsider as a black American intellectual residing in

France. This removed the position from both American and French cultures, however, provided him a privileged vantage point from which to review and critique racism in both cultures. As he devoted more time in France, Wright grew to be increasingly disillusioned with what he had originally perceived as French antiracism, as seen in articles such as “I Choose Exile” His Paris writings move inexorably toward anticolonial critique, culminating with Black Power, The Color

Curtain, and Pagan Spain.

Wright thus became aggravated by the restrictions of his French expatriate environment and switched his attention to decolonization battles. As Michael Fabre remarks, this period started the third and ultimate phase in Wright‟s literary career, after the American and French stages: a “new view, in the fifties, that the salvation of humanity could come only from the Third

243

World” (Fabre, UQ 316). For Wright, the Third World was a kind of political third space, beyond the Russian left and the American right, where humanity could transform itself. In my view, earlier critical treatments of this period in Wright‟s career have tended to stress a relatively imprecise liminality or transnational hybridity, thereby downplaying Wright‟s strong commitment to Enlightenment modernity.

The nonfiction period would have displayed the most stable period in Wright‟s literary career. After a period of searching, he finally believed he had found a space that he could commit himself to. Although he remained at odds with many of his colleagues and friends over how to think of world affairs, he found serenity in the subject matter of the Third World and

Europe. Considering the different liberation movements immediately following his death in

1960, not only in Africa and Asia but the in his native land, we find out a writer ahead of his time. The turned down fiction, and travel writing of his exile is what motivated many ideas of these movements and their most bracing conditions. Much of the current black literature might be mere notes of native sons, but much of the modern black political culture is an international elaboration of Black Power and The Color Curtain. The approach he wrestled with ideology and doctrine in his ongoing self-education is an outstanding pattern for all writers attempting to consider issues for themselves. Instead of being rejected, it should be further investigated to examine Wright‟s full contributions as an artist and political thinker.

This study attempts to demonstrate the ineradicable link between transnationalism, race, religion, and culture, an interconnection that should be tackled at large. With or without the assistance of family members or friends, Wright with his African American background, battled

244 with being black in a white-centered world. Nonetheless, he can understand that the problem of the world is more than a black-white dichotomy. Wright proposes that the Third-World leaders must “break the force of religion and tradition and create secular ground for the building of rational societies” (Wright, “Psychological Reaction” 57). He urges the people of the world to create the bridges of dialogue driven by rational comprehension that transcend racial, national, and cultural affiliations.

By way of example, Pagan Spain is about Spain and Spanish culture after the Spanish

Civil War. Wright‟s approach to Spain and Spanish culture develops by way of the bullfight, where Wright views a traditional ceremony required by an under-developed society to compensate for insecurities caused by their losing sense of global stature. Idividuals‟ maturity is indicative of a culture‟s comfort. However, If Spaniards keep submitting to the hegemonic power of Franco regime, they will engage with the inevitability of death of hope.

In his later works, Wright was considering precisely such a project: stretching freedom within modernity in these works. His marginalized position within the American society had led him early on to think through and speak loudly about issues of race and nation. With his departure from the U.S., he continued to expand the scope of his thinking, searching for political allies in his struggle against racism and imperialist oppression outside of America‟s boundaries.

To conduct this challenge, he determined it essential to be significantly free to select his way to live as well as his allies and comrades. His bold declarations of cynical national detachment, associated with his official desertion of both the United States and the Communist Party, indicate a need to go beyond the demands imposed on him by American history.

245

The traveling American in Wright‟s narratives continues to be psychologically restricted by the homeland; the ingenuity of Wright‟s formulation is defined as much by loss as it is by presence. Wright‟s juxtaposition of the loss and presence is enhanced by the conscious embrace of migration, of the condition of shuttling between transnational spaces. It explains the paradoxical state of being grounded in a place but not of the place. This experience has overlaps with what Paul Gilroy, in his reading of Richard Wright‟s travel writings, call the necessity to make the state of “chronic rootlessness habitable” (Black Atlantic 150).

The dilemma of Wright‟s “Americanness” is possibly best tackled in an unpublished piece that he presumably wrote for a French audience. There, as reproduced in Fabre‟s The

World of Richard Wright, Wright provides not one but various approaches to the question, “Am I an American?” Every single answer starts with, “I am an American but…” (Fabre, The World

188), and Fabre indicates that the “but” is an essential point of these replies. Nevertheless, given his speculation that the text was composed in the late 50s, which would suggest either after or simultaneously with both Pagan Spain and White Man Listen! It is quite remarkable that Wright determined himself as an American, much less 86 times in a row. The American he introduced himself as being, of course, was an American with a transnational twist.

Wright, when writing his narratives, still experienced connected to America, but much more to an America of ideas than to a present place. The idea that linked him emotionally to America was one he had matured with and could not help but adopt, but it was also an idea that conflicted so extremely with his understanding of America that he had to leave the country to keep it alive.

Only in a non-American frame could he feel independence, equality, justice, and all the other ideals that were so inextricably linked for him to the idea of America. Being American was thus

246 not to pledge allegiance to the American flag or to own an American passport although he would learn the value of the latter painfully. To be American meant to be thoroughly sophisticated. “I am that sort of American,” he writes, “ being an American is to be able to live as a man anywhere,” valuing “the sacredness that I feel resides in human personality.” (Fabre The World

189). This attitude should not be tangled with the often-heard argument that America‟s melting- pot policy equals a transnational understanding.

Wright does not state that American society is even remotely transnational, nor does he suggest that America is in any position to “educate,” “police,” or otherwise colonize other nations. He is an American, but he does not need to “use the ideals of [his] country as an excuse to ask you to give [him] access to the minerals or the strategic positions of your country” (Fabre

The World 190). Although conscious of American realities, Wright does not, perhaps cannot, detach his transnational beliefs from their recognized Americanness, not even in the late 1950s, after a decade of expatriation. “American” ideals, most of which he can only experience in a non-American system, do not, for all that, stop being American for him. It is possible, however, to become aware of this situation and to look for the support of an Other to progressively surpass it through an exchange of conflicting views and ideologies. This Other-assisted transcendence is what Wright tried to achieve during the final years of his life and is also one of the central concerns of Pagan Spain.

Ghana is Richard Wright‟s first country where he examines his roots or the first opportunity for the development of an African society that could realize the idealism of the

Enlightenment with equity and technical modernity. Wright interprets the early 1950s as a substantial period politically and economically, a time when the Cold War has generated a

247 choice of capitulation either to the domineering nature of capitalism or of Communism. Africa now can show itself to the world as a non-aligned instance of egalitarian development, before the world subordinates itself, terminally in Wright‟s view, to the tyrannical mastery of either global force.

This study illustrates how Wright‟s engagement with the Third World and Europe compelled him to conceive of a transnational viewpoint and mode of portrayal in his travel writings such as Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain. While in 1937 Wright had theorized a perspective as “a pre-conscious assumption, something which a writer takes for granted, something which he wins through his living” (“ Blueprint” 58), he becomes self- conscious about his perspective as a “man of the West” who was also black in his Third World writings. Wright explains this adequate but ambivalent perspective as a “third point of view”

(“Tradition and Industrialization” 78, 79) that was formed in the West, but that permits him to comprehend anti-Western perspectives. In The Color Curtain, Wright endeavors to present an image of a “secular and rational basis of thought and feeling” (CC 219). This representation might link the Third World and the West, replacing the connective bonds of race and religion as well as the systems of communism and capitalism.

In the transnational trilogy, Wright‟s debate of transnationalism often signifies that national boundaries are remarkably permeable, considering that they track the migration of ideas and people across such borders. Wright‟s travels among various countries and his interactions with people from different racial and cultural backgrounds have drawn diversified aspects of the world into the same flat playing field. The imaginary mapping created during the early modern period, with the rise of colonialism and the nation-state itself, has motivated the strategies in

248 which Wright thinks of himself in relation to people in other spaces around the globe. This perspective is clearly observed in his Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain.

Because travel often solicits an elevated understanding of race and nation, Wright‟s travel writing is invaluable for realizing the intersecting roles of race and nation in the articulation of a transnational identity. He uses travel writing to attempt a reconsideration of our international imaginary in ways that assist us in modernizing colonial European thoughts about the West as separate and outstanding space to others. Therefore, Wright‟s transnational trilogy attempts to allow us to envision systems of universal interaction that could challenge the European colonial order still functioning underneath the surface of interactions during the early twentieth century.

Additionally, Wright‟s transnational trilogy centers on questions of oppression and suppression by the state. Wright highlights that the East and West should collaborate if intellectuals are to affect change in the nation-state. Wright calls for the need to not only mobilize an audience into action but also challenge the oppression and dictatorship with a means of liberating themselves from limitations. Intellectuals then need to aid in the process of developing ways in which members of society can begin to subvert the various systems of oppression by using these systems to their advantage and thus eventually find ways of transforming the system altogether.

My study presents some areas that could benefit further research. Firstly, transnationalism in American expatriate literature can be further complicated in terms of discussing the fiction of

American expatriate writers such as Earnest Hemingway and James Baldwin. There could also potentially be different representations of identities depending on intersections between class,

249 race, ethnicity, or education. Also, the works of female American expatriate writers such as

Gertrude Stein can be explored concerning strategies of subversion and resistance that they develop in engaging with issues in the local and transnational spheres. Such approaches could offer valuable insight into the unique role that women play as intellectuals, as well as the importance of such strategies in fighting not just gender inequality, but also inequalities at the international level.

250

Works Cited

I. Works by Richard Wright

Wright, Richard. “Apropos Prepossessions” Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of

Pathos. Richard Wright. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954.

------. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. 1944. New York:

Buccaneer Books, 1991.

------. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper and Brothers,

1954.

------. “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance

Anthology. Eds. Venetria K. Patton, and Maureen Honey. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers UP, 2001.

------. “Closing Session of the 1st International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists,”

Presence Africaine, Nos. 8-9-10 (June-November 1956): 370-373.

------. The Color Curtain. Clevelnad and NY: The World Publishing Company, 1956.

------. “How „Bigger‟ Was Born.” Richard Wright’s Native Son: a Critical Handbook.

Ed. Richard Abcarian. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1970.

------. Introduction. Black Metropolis. Horace Cayton and St C. Drake London: Jonathan Cape,

1946.

------. Pagan Spain. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1957.

------. “Tradition and Industrialization” White Man, Listen! Richard Wright. New York:

Doubleday and Company, 1957.

------. “The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People” White Man, Listen!

251

Richard Wright. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957.

------. Native Son. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

------. Uncle Tom's Children. New York: Harper & Row,1965.

------. White Man, Listen! NY: Doubleday& Company, Inc, 1957.

------. “Why and Wherefore” White Man, Listen. Richard Wright. New York:

Doubleday and Company, 1957.

------. “A World View of the American Negro.” Richard Wright’s Native Son: a Critical

Handbook. Ed. Richard Abcarian. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1970.

------. The Outsider. New York: Harper & Row, 1953.

II. Works by Others

Abrams, Janet, and Peter Hall. Else/where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks

and Territories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006.

Abraham, Peter. “The Blacks” An African Treasury : Articles Essays, Stories, Poems by Black

Africans. Ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Crown Publishers, 1968.

Adler, Jane. “Travel as Performed Art”. American Journal of Sociology 94.6 (1989):

1366-1391. Web. 14 August 2014.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “A Long Way from Home: Wright in the Gold Coast.” Richard

Wright. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 36-48.

Bakhtin, M. “The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.

Ed and trans. C. Emerson and M. Hoiquist. Austin: University of

Texas Press: 1981. 41-83.

Bakish, David. Richard Wright. New York: Ungar, 1973.

252

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York:

Dial Press, 1961.

------. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985.

New York: St. Martin‟s, 1985.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman New York:

Citadel Press, 1976.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London, New York : Routledge, 1994.

------,ed. Nation and Narration. London, New York: Roubledge, 1990.

Blair, Sara. “The Photograph as History: Richard Wright, Black Power, and Narratives of the

Nation”. English Language Notes. 44.2 (Fall/Winter2006): 65-72.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Bourne, Randolph S. “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Magazine. 297.6 (July 1916): 58-59.

Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. New York: Ecco P, 2000.

Burgas, Catherine. Challenging Theory: Discipline After Deconstruction. Aldershot, England:

Ashgate, 1999.

Campbell. James T. Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-

2005. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

Callahan, John. “„American Culture is of a Whole‟: From the Letters of Ralph Ellison”.

New Republic.220.9 (1999): 34-49.

Callahan, North. Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works. University Park :

Pennsylvania State UP, 1987.

Carman, Harry J. “Richard Wright in Spain.” New York Herald Tribune. 10 March 1957.

253

Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. John M. Reilly.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Cobb, Nina Kressner. “Richard Wright and the Third World.” Critical Essays on

Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: Hall, 1982. 228-39.

Cromwell, Adelaide M. and Martin Kilson, eds. Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro

American Leaders on Africa from the 1800s to the 1950s. London: Cass, 1969.

Delbanco, Andrew. Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now. New York:

Farrar, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.

Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1987.

Diawara, Manthia. In Search of Africa. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Dixion, Nancy. “Did Richard Wright Get it Wrong? A Spanish Look at Pagan Spain.”

Mississippi Quarterly 61.4 (Fall2008): 581-91.

Duara, Prasenjit. “Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When.” Becoming

National: A Reader. Eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny. New York: Oxford UP,

1996, 151-178.

DuBois, W.E.B. Writings: The suppression of the African slave-trade; The souls of black folk;

Dusk of dawn; Essays and articles from The Crisis. Ed. Nathan I. Huggins.

New York: Library Classics of America. 1986. 549-802.

-----. The Souls of Black Folk. Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008.

Dunbar, Eve. “Black is a Region: Segregation and American Literary Regionalism in Richard

Wright‟s The Color Curtain.” African American Review 42.1 (Spring 2008): 109-19.

254

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964.

Evans, Dennis F. “The Good Women, Bad Women, Prostitutes and Slaves of Pagan Spain:

Richard Wright‟s Look Beyond the Phallocentric Self.” Richard

Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections. Ed. Virginia Whatley Smith.

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840- 1980. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1991.

------. “Wright's Exile.” Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Eds. David Ray

and Robert T. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: U of P: 1973.121-39.

------. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. Urbana :

University of Illinois Press, 1993.

------. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.

Fanon, Fantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York : Grove Press, 1967.

------. Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York:

Grove Press, 1963.

Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

Writings, 1972 1977. Ed. and trans. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Folks, Jeffery J. From Wright to Toni Morrison: Ethics in Modern and Postmodern American

Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Fox, Claire. “Commentary: The Transnational Turn and the Hemispheric Return.”

American Literary History 18.3 (2006): 638-647. Web. 23 July 2015.

Levander, Caroline F. and Robert S. Levine, eds. Hemispheric American Literary History.

255

Spec. issue of American Literary History 18.3 (2006). Web. 23 July 2015.

Frederick, William H. and Robert L. Worden, eds. Indonesia: a Country Study. Washington,

D,C: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1993.

Gaines, Kevin. “Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the

Dialectics of Diaspora”. Social Text 67, 19.2 (Summer 2001): 75-101.

Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal o f a Native Son. New York: Anchor Press, 1980.

Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge,

Mass: Harvard UP, 2001.

------. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 1993.

------. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York : Columbia UP, 2005.

Gross, Robert A. „The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World‟,

Journal of American Studies, 34.3, 2000.

Gounardoo , Jean-François & Joseph J. Rodgers. The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard

Wright and James Baldwin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Gunnar, Myrdal. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.

New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “The Color Curtain, Multiculturalism, and American Racial Issues”

Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

------. “The Color Curtain: Richard Wright‟s Journey into Asia.” Richard Wright’s

Travel Writings: New Reflections. Ed. Virginia Whatley Smith. Jackson: University

Press of Mississippi, 2001.

------. “ Creation of the Self in Richard Wright‟s Black Boy.” Black American Literature Forum.

256

19.2 (Summer 1985): 70-75. Web. 10 March 2015

------. Cross-Cultural Visions: in African American Literature: West Meets East. NY: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2011.

------. Introduction. Cross-Cultural Vision in African American Literature: West Meets East.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

------. “Pagan Spain: Wright‟s Discourse on Religion and Culture.” Cross-Cultural Visions in

African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku. Columbus: The Ohio

State UP, 2006.

------. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia and London: University of Missouri

Press, 1996.

------. “Richard Wright‟s Pagan Spain and Cross-Cultural Discourse.” Postmodernity and

Cross-Culturalism. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Madison, N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Eds. Jana Evans

Braziel and Anita Mannur. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

------. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Theories of Race and Racism:

A Reader. Ed. Les Back and John Solomon. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Hanchard, Michael George. “Black Trans-nationalism, Africana Studies, and the 21st Century.”

Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, (Nov. 2004): 129-153.

Hardt, Michael, and . Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Harrison, Joseph G. Rev. of Pagan Spain. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception.

John M. Reilly. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978: 288-89.

Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Himes, Chester. A Case of Rape. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1984.

257

------. My Life of Absurdity. New York: Thunder‟s Mouth Press, 1976.

Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Race in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard university Press, 2000.

Jansen, G. H. Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.

Jones, Edward A. “Africa Speaks”. Rev. of Presence Africaine. Phylon (1940-1956) 9.3

(3rd Qtr. 1948): 284-285.

Johnson, James Weldon. Preface. The Book of American Negro Poetry. 1st edition.

Ed. James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983.

Julian, Kunnie. “Richard Wright's Interrogation of Negritude: Revolutionary Implications for

Pan Africanism and Liberation.” Journal of Pan African Studies. 4.9 (Jan2012): 1-23.

Kiuchi, Toru and Yoshinobu Hakutani. Richard Wright: A Documented Chronology, 1908-1960.

Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014.

Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations With Richard Wright. Jackson: U P of

Mississippi, 1993.

Koch, Kenneth. One Train. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Lamming, George. The Pleasure of Exile. London : Michael Joseph, 1960.

Lauren, Paul Gordon. Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy and Racial

Discrimination. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.

Learned, Barry. “U.S. Lets Negro Explain Race ills, Wright Declares.” Conversations with

Richard Wright. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Jackson: University

Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from

Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Lisle, Debbie. The of Contemporary Travel Writing. Cambridge:

258

Cambridge UP, 2006.

Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. “Beyond What?

An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul,

Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Lowe, John. “Richard Wright as Traveler/Ethnographer: The Conundrums of Pagan Spain.”

In Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections. Ed. Virginia Whatley Smith.

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.

------. “The Transnation Vision of Richard Wright's Pagan Spain.” Southern Quarterly

46.3 (Spring 2009): 69-99. Web. 5 December 2014.

McMahon, Francis E. “Spain through Secularist Spectacles,” America 96 (9march 1957),

648,653. Rpt. Richard Wright: the Critical Reception. John M. Reilly: 300.

Moore, Jack B. “Black. Power Revisited: In Search of Richard Wright,” Mississippi Quarterly,

41.2 (Spring 1988): 161-187. Web. 3 Sep 2014.

Neal, Larry. “And Shine Swam On.” Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Eds.

LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: Morrow and Company Inc., 1968: 637-656.

Nkrumah, Kwame. I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology. London:

William Heinemann, 1961.

Ottley, Roi: “He Should Stick to Fiction,” Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of

Books (March 3,1957).

Popeau, Jean Baptiste. Dialogues of Negritude: An Analysis of the Cultural Context of Black

Writing. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2003.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:

Routledge. 1992.

259

Quayson, Ato, and Girish Daswani, eds. A companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism.

Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013.

Ray, David and Robert M. Farnsworth, eds. Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.

Reilly, John M. “Richard Wright and the Art of Non-Fiction: Stepping Out on the Stage of the

World,” Callaloo 28 (1986): 507-520.

Reilly, John M., ed. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978.

Reuman, Ann. “Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldüa.” MELUS 25.2

(2000): 3-54. Web. 13 June 2015.

Reynolds, Guy. “ „Sketches of Spain‟: Richard Wright„s Pagan Spain and African American

Representations of the Hispanic”. Journal of American Studies. 34.3 (2000): 487-502.

Web. 12 May 2015.

Roberson, Susan, ed. Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2001.

Robinson, Lori. “Region and Race.” A Companion to the regional Literatures of America. Ed.

Charles Crow. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London:

Zed Press, 1983.

Rodgers, Daniel. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA:

Belknap Press, 1998.

Rosaldo, Renato. “Ideology, Place, and People without Culture.” Cultural Anthopology

3.1 (1988): 77-87. Web. 20 July 2015.

Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World

260

War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rowley, Hazel. “Richard Wright: Intellectual Exile”. Writing the Lives of Writers. Eds. Warwick

Gould and Thomas F.Stanley. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1998.

------. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Royce, Josiah. The Philosophy of Loyalty. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995.

------.Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems. NY: Books for Library

Press, 1967.

Said, Edward W. Culture And Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

------. Representations of the Intellectual. New York : Vintage Books, 1996.

------. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Boos, 1994.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism. London: Methuen, 1948.

------. Being and Nothingness : an essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. and intro. Hazel

E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

------. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical Library, 1957.

------. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Trans. Steven Ungar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1988.

Shankar, S. “Richard Wright‟s Black Power: Colonial Politics and the Travel Narrative.”

Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections. Ed. Virginia Whatley Smith.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Smith, Anthony D. “ The Nation: Real or Imagined? The Warwick Debates on nationalism.”

Nations and Nationalism 2.3 (1996): 357-70.

Smith, Virginia Whatley, ed. Introduction. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

261

------. “Richard Wright‟s Passage to Indonesia: The Travel Writer/Narrator as Participant/

Observer of Anti-colonial Imperatives in the Color Curtain.” Richard Wright’s Travel

Writings: New Reflections. Ed. Virginia Whatley Smith. Jackson: University Press of

Mississippi, 2001.

Soekarno and Cindy Heller Adams. Sukarno: An Autobiography. Indianapolis :

Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

Spivak, Gayatri C. “Reading the World: Literary Studies in the 80s”. College English. 43.7

(Nov. 1981).

------. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

Stringer, Dorothy. “Psychology and Black Liberation in Richard Wright's Black Power.”

Journal of Modern Literature 32.4 (Summer 2009): 105-24. Web. 10 Feb 2014.

Suyin, Han. Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modem China, 1898-1976. New York:

Hill and Wang, 1994.

Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. 2nd edition

Urbana: U Illinois P, 1991.

Tally, Robert T. “Geocriticism and Classic American Literature”. eCommons@ State

University.Web. 12 May 2015.

Trinh, Minh-ha T. “Other than Myself/My Other Self.” Travellers‟ Tales: narratives of home

and displacement. Ed. George Robertson. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man. New York:

Warner, 1988.

Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen. Chicago:

Ivan R. Dee, 2010.

262

Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1968.

Weiss, M. Lynn. “Para Usted: Richard Wright‟s Pagan Spain.” In The Black Columbiad:

Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Eds. Werner Sollors and

Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1995: 212-225

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Wilson, Rob and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural

Studies in the Era of Globalization. California: New Pacific Press, 2007.

Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham:

Duke University Press, 2004.

Ungar, Steven. “Introduction”. “What is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 1988.

Zangari, Sostene M. “Straightjacketed into the Future: Richard Wright and the Ambiguities of

Decolonization.” Black Scholar 39.12 (Spring/Summer 2009): 78-83. Web.

5 March 2013.

263