Books by Richard Wright

Richard Wright: Early Works  / Black Boy  / Native Son  / Uncle Tom's Children / 12 Million Black Voices  / Richard Wright: Later Works

The Outsider  /  Pagan Spain /  Black Power  /  White Man Listen!  / The Color Curtain /  Savage Holiday / The Long Dream

Eight Men: Short Stories  / Haiku / American Hunger / Lawd Today!  /  A Father’s Law

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Books by Jerry W. Ward  Jr.

Trouble the Water (1997) / Black Southern Voices (1992) / The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)  / The Katrina Papers

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One Writer' Legacy: Richard Wright and Our 21st Century

By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Our twenty-first century is comparable to living in the land of the shadow of death and terrorism; no great light is granted unto us; we have to seek such light as is available. Richard Wright’s legacy, the published and unpublished body of his writing, is one path upon which one might journey in question enlightenment. Rejecting what the world of our new century would have us believe is reality, we have the option of reading Wright’s legacy with deep and hyper attention and discovering the light that actuality may provide. Such might be the prophylaxis to protect ourselves against disinformation and misinformation.
 
Reading the legacy with deep and hyper attention¹ is, on one hand, an act of practiced history, of willing to engage Wright’s writings much in the way R. G. Collingwood recommended his fellow historians should engage their subjects by inhabiting the minds of the subjects. Whether such an act is felicitous in discovering actuality is not the issue. The issue is Wright’s commitment to understanding his world within a lifetime from 1908 to 1960. Insofar as we might inhabit his mind, we recognize that Wright himself invoked histories to situate his perspectives.

His perspectives are obviously always the past for his current readers (and those of some anticipated future), and those perspectives may seem to be imprisoned by the discursive limits of the twentieth century. This would be especially true regarding his ideas and perspectives on international politics. These limits must be acknowledged. They need not retard efforts to grasp the surgical consciousness Wright developed, in part, through his reading and incorporation of the past in his poetry, short fiction, novels , drama, and non-fiction.
 
Reading the legacy with deep and hyper attention is, on the other hand, an act that results in an eruption of problems. Due respect must be accorded those who question the contemporary relevance of Wright’s works. They are usually questioning the reliability of history as narrative rather than the validity of history as a process of thinking. I argue, however, the relevance of Wright’s works (like the relevance of any dead writer’s words) is socially constructed in our notice of fragile referentiality and in our self-conscious readings. Our close readings and hyper-dominated readings of his works are complicated by our ideological baggage. That baggage does seem to influence our use of literacy as we analyze and seek to find rational explanatory patterns in our contemporary world. It governs our ability to observe, judge, and reach tentative conclusions. It is Wright that we learn to frame critical questions.
 
If aesthetic distance is displaced by aesthetic intimacy, we begin to think with Wright. We begin to sense how his flexible Marxism and fidelity to Western assumptions strengthen belief that the past enlightens the present with Faulknerian viciousness. We begin to discern how much our self-interest is entwined with some of his major themes: the permanence of rabid racisms; capitalism’s dependency on enforcing racial inequity; the permanence of imperial, colonial, and neo-colonial enterprises; the non-essential nature of human identity; the immanence of terrorism and global conflicts.
 
All of Wright’s works are in greater and lesser degrees superb instances of aesthetic and political critical, crucial thinking. They are rooted in the proletarian imagination and modes of cognition. Janet Galligani Casey has recently observed that Olive Tilford Dargan’s novel Call Home the Heart (1932) “suggests that the relation between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political’ is manifested by a constant if often implicit tension rather than a mutual exclusivity” (245).

Implicit tension is explicit in Richard Wright’ thought. It is indeed enlightening to read Wright’s early proletarian poetry,the stories in Uncle Tom's Children (1938 and 1940), the novels Native Son   (1940) and Lawd Today! (1963), the novella Rite of Passage (1994) the play Native Son (1941) the photo documentary 12 Million Black Voices  (1941), and the autobiography Black Boy (1945 and 1991)—works Wright completed before becoming an expatriate in Paris in 1947. Wright discovered existentialism in Mississippi not in France. He rather thoroughly raised questions about racism, capitalisms, the formation of personality and identity and terrorism and counter-terrorism American style.

He understood manifestations of racism in the New World since the fifteenth century. He understood what the sociologist Howard Winant tells us in The World Is A Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II:
 
Race has been fundamental in global politics and culture for half a millennium. It continues to signify and structures social life not only experientially and locally, but nationally and globally. Race is present everywhere; it is evident in the distribution of resources and power and in the desires and fears of individuals from Alberta to Zimbabwe. (1)

Wright understood racism and terrorism do have researchable histories. Their various manifestations may operate either in concert or in a singular fashion at any given time. The formation of many modern nation states through the world is anchored in combinations of political and economic terrorism.The contemporary scene is brutally, inhumanely illustrated in the Middle East and on the continent of Africa. Above all, Wright recognized and interrogated the transmogrifying force of such tragedies on the human personality. The recognition quickened his interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the origins of criminality.

The works Wright created before his death in 1960—the novels The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and The Long Dream (1958) and  A Father’s Law (2008); the short stories in Eight Men (1961), the travel books Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1957); the 817 haiku in This Other World: Haiku  (1998); the striking essays in White Man Listen!  (1957)—the relentless problems of alienation, moral disengagement, the power of religion, international policies, imperialism, and lack of remorse for acts of murder.

Wright hinted in his later works that the histories and emerging events of Eastern and Western imperialism and fascism can be examined as surreal, irrational, and effective immoral acts in the service of power. The historicized hyper and deep attentive acts which can be our survival mechanisms, our limited salvation, draw forth the accusative and valid and necessary questions. We become aware that such a film as Hotel Rwanda allows us to see the constellation formed by imperialism, genocide, and terrorism. We begin to see sites of reciprocal responsibility for our global tragedy in the reactions of the oppressed and the oppressor.

A reader who wants to explore the consequences of Wright’s instigations can now access the Internet. She or he can follow the branching links of cyberspace which eventually cast light on the appropriateness of returning to the past and experiencing the uncanny shock of Richard Wright’s recognitions. He prompts us to be historical in agonizing over our lives, our destinies. His legacy in our 21st century fosters our more active “readings” of actuality and contemporary existence. The legacy constitutes its own warrants for our passionate attention.
 

¹ See N. Katherine Hayles's 'Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes' in Profession 2007.

Works Cited

Casey, Janet Galligani. “Reviving the Thirties: The Case for Teaching Proletarian Fiction in the Undergraduate American Literature Classroom.” College English 70.3 (2008): 233-248.
 
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession 2007. New York: Modern Language Association, 2007.
 
Winant, Howard. The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
 
January 27, 2008

The Homestretch to the Richard Wright Centennial

posted 28 January 2008