Wright Richard - Richard Wrights Travel Writings: new reflections

Richard Wrights Travel Writings

Richard Wright in Ghana (1953)

New Reflections

Edited by Virginia Whatley Smith

Margaret Walker Alexander Series in
African American Studies

Photographs, courtesy of the Yale Collection of

American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT

06520. All rights reserved. Permission to quote from

Wrights materials granted by Mrs. Ellen Wright.

All rights reserved.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Copyright 2001 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richard Wrights travel writings : new reflections /

edited by Virginia Whatley Smith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57806-347-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Wright, Richard 19081960Knowledge

Foreign countries. 2. Afro-AmericansTravel

Foreign countriesHistory. 3. Travelers writings,

AmericanHistory and criticism. 4. Wright,

Richard, 19081960Journeys.

I. Smith, Virginia Whatley.

PS3545.R815 Z825 2001

813.52dc21

00-047727

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In Memory of Richard Wright, 19081960

Today, as the tide of white domination of the land

mass of Asia and Africa recedes, there lies exposed to

view a procession of shattered cultures, disintegrated

societies, and a writhing sweep of more aggressive,

irrational religion than the world has known for

centuries. And, as scientific research, partially freed from

the blight of colonial control, advances, we are

witnessing the rise of a new genre of academic literature

dealing with colonial and post-colonial facts from a

wider angle of vision than ever possible before.

The personality distortions of hundreds of millions

of black, brown, and yellow people that are being

revealed by this literature are confounding and will

necessitate drastic alteration of our past evaluations

of colonial rule.

Richard Wright, White Man, Listen!

S. Shankar

Ngwarsungu Chiwengo

Jack B. Moore

Yoshinobu Hakutani

Virginia Whatley Smith

John Lowe

Keneth Kinnamon

Dennis F. Evans

Virginia Whatley Smith

Richard Wright Publicizing White Man, Listen! (1957)

Once author Richard Wright fled the United States in 1946 to live as an expatriate in Paris, France, he entered an arena of intellectual thought and humanistic challenges that transcended the narrow limits of his former American home. As a result of this intercontinental shift, the writers global experiences to come would lead, by the time of his death in i960, to his adopting the title of Twentieth Century Western Man of Color to complement his self-appointed role of spokesperson for oppressed people worldwide. Not only did exposure to French existentialist philosophy affect Wrights reappraisal of his American identity, but also, by 1957, two world events accounted for his self-definition in White Man, Listen! as a rootless man of the world. One factor was the recently inaugurated Pan-Africanist movement arising from the Manchester (England) Congress in 1945 to decolonize Africa; a second was Indonesias lead role, within hours after the end of World War II, in announcing its independence from colonial rule. Attracted by these anti-colonial struggles for human rights, which Wright equated to his ongoing war to achieve equal opportunity for African Americans, he extended his concerns to a global stage involving Afro-Asian and European countries. The result of his multiple travels during the decade of the 1950s was a series of nonfictional productions now categorized by genre as travel literature.

These travel books include Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1953); The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference (1956); Pagan Spain (1957); and White Man, Listen! (1957)a collection of essays containing supplementary remarks and speeches made by the author at lectures in Europe about his Afro-Asian travels. Grouped in this body of long accounts are Wrights aborted plans for a fourth travel book on French West Africa (c. 1959), which exists in notes, outlines, and a draft.

Contrary to the traditional European and American exploration, colonial, or eighteenth-century travel book, Wrights representation of the masters narrative has taken another shape. Traditional Anglo travel accounts take on such recognizable descriptions as exploration, exile, captivity, and/or excursion literature and have been authored by explorers, scientists, missionaries, and, most frequently, tourists. Since Wrights texts, decidedly non-illustrated in their American productions, were sociologically discursive and politically candid, his publishers, agents, and critics in the 1950s and through the 1980s did not consider them travel books. Yet Wright, an innovator of style who had called for a Blueprint for Negro Writing in 1937, not only adopted the genre and its forms but also adapted it into an expression of African American travel writing.

Richard Wrights travel books of the 1950s recapitulate a body of concerns about emancipation from oppressive colonial rule and freedom of religious or gender expression resonating similar cries for human rights by African/African American slaves through their own genre, the slave narrative. Its classic model is that of Frederick Douglasss 1845 Narrative. African Americans have also seen the advantage of how this cultural genre with its socio-political message of freedom from enslavement adapts to travel writing. Its earliest expression was inaugurated by William Wells Brown, a slave narrativist, who, in 1852, published Three Years in Europe, or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met.

Wright was familiar with Douglasss slave narrative; however, it is uncertain whether he read Browns travel book. What is for sure is that Wright magnified, modified, and personalized a nascent and dormant, African American genre by anchoring the motif of travel to a foreign culture as the core of these nonfictions, and presented his readers with his reactions first hand. He takes his readers along with him onto the international stage of history to hear the hues and cries of the formerly or presently oppressed people as he witnesses and records in Black Power Kwame Nkrumahs anti-colonial initiatives for gaining the Gold Coasts (Ghanas) independence in 1953. In The Color Curtain, the author records the surreal convergence of world leaders from twenty-nine black, brown, and yellow formerly or newly-decolonized nations at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. He details their efforts to draft strategies to offset maneuvers by the West for neo-colonialist control while, at the same time, protecting their needs for the technological advancements offered by their nemeses of America or Russia. Different in landscape but similar in focus,