Richard Wright
For Shandong Journal of Foreign Language Teaching
"Directions in the Study of Richard Wright"
Contemporary studies in languages and literatures are
marked by varying degrees of anxiety. The impact of new technologies
on the uses of language can be noted in the alacrity with which many
people engage one another in social networks. Users, particularly in
the United States, instant message, tweet, text-message, or post items
on Facebook in forms that contrast dramatically with tradition uses of
standard American English. People who have been trained to attend
carefully to spelling, grammar, syntax, coherence, and unity of ideas
may find themselves either amused or dismayed or confused by the new
forms of communicating. On the other hand, people who little regard
for accuracy or nuances in communication willingly embrace what might
be called a "rhetoric of carelessness." They seem to be convinced that
playful inventiveness is the future, that linguistic conventions are
arbitrary, and that minimal representation of thought is the ideal.
Thus, it is to be expected that some scholars and teachers fear that
new habits of writing and reading will undermine the desire or ability
of younger generations to make critical judgments about literature.
These new habits eschew the discipline and patience necessary for
analysis and interpretation of literature. They can not be dismissed
as trivial, because they are fundamental in changing what counts as
knowledge.
Anxiety about literature and language is intensified by
ambivalence regarding the changes that accompany the progress of
globalization. Those changes influence how we speak of a large range
of topics: emerging world orders, ecology, biocultural transformations
(including shifts in the cognitive functions of the brain), and the
cultural studies that have displaced or subsumed what was once called
literary theory and criticism. Even if we try to be empirical and
scientific in our approaches to the study of literature, we still have
the onus of being uncertain in efforts to generate appropriate
questions for our investigations of twentieth-century American
writers. We are overwhelmed by our options; we choke on our wealth of
information. We are frustrated by global theories that dismiss the
importance of nations and national boundaries (which are also cultural
boundaries) that have been so critical in the growth of American, or
to be more accurate, United States literature. Much depends on how
one conceptualizes globalization in the study of literature, or
answers the question: what is globalization?[i]
Is globalization primarily a way of thinking about
historical processes, or is it a conviction that post-modernity has
succeeded in compromising our ability to locate ourselves and our
cultural expressions in a history that can be verified? These
questions do not have simple answers. Theory notwithstanding, we can
be sure that twentieth-century literature is indelibly marked by
national origins. It is unethical to pretend that older works can or
should be read as if they were written under the conditions of
electronic revolutions. Globalization may make us sensitive to the
metaphor of the uncertainty principle, but it neither can nor should
erase historical consciousness in literary and cultural studies.
Historical consciousness existed prior any newfangled global
consciousness. Cautionary hypotheses ought to govern directions in the
study of the literature of the United States or of any nation-state.
Awareness of the limits of knowledge are crucial, for example, in the
study of Richard Wright (1908-1960).
It is remarkable that many contemporary studies of
Wright's works tend to recycle old ideas about "universal" themes,
naturalism, modernism, the writer's ideology and political intentions,
and the much overworked notion of "double consciousness" as an innate
feature of African American thought. The more progressive or future-
oriented studies, however, attempt to be interdisciplinary. They may
adapt some version of intersectionality research, which "is defined
principally by its focus on the simultaneous and interactive effects
of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as
categories of difference in the United States and beyond"(185).[ii]
Studies that borrow from intersectionality theory have the potential
of making us more discriminating in our investigations of Wright's
works. They can assist us in distinguishing between which of his
works have immediate productive relevance (the potential to provoke
synchronic thinking about contemporary human issues) and those which
have reflective relevance (the potential to invite diachronic thinking
about change). For example, Wright's novella "Down by the Riverside"
provokes thought about human behavior in the aftermath of natural or
man-made disasters; in contrast, Native Son and 12 Million Black
Voices may invite thought about the historical consequences of
migration and urbanization, whereas Black Power may urge us to ponder
the vexed outcomes of twentieth-century liberation struggles in the
post-colonial African nation of Ghana. It is reasonable to argue that
future studies of Richard Wright and other American writers of his
generation should examine both the writer's and the reader's
assumptions about the function of literature in his or her own time.
It is illuminating to know whether harmony or discord is more
prominent. Otherwise, we shall only compound anxiety and confusion
what makes literature relevant in the contexts of globalization.
Directions in the study of Wright are most valuable when
they are aligned with questions about what his works reveal or seem to
predict about human beings and change. For what revolutions in human
thought do Wright's works continue to be germane? Does the impact
Wright wanted his fiction and nonfiction to have still affect us?
Will continuing study keep interest alive?
Explorations associated with the 2008 Richard Wright
Centennial allow us to sketch how Wright scholars have begun to
reposition their engagements with his published and unpublished works
and how those works may assume new significance for readers and
thinkers. The celebration of Richard Wright as an internationally
honored citizen of the republic of American letters and culture did
not officially conclude, at least for those who respected the wishes
of the Richard Wright Estate, until November 28, 2010, the fiftieth
anniversary of his death. This conclusion, however, was a resumption
of efforts to secure memory of Wright's significance beyond his
writing the classic texts Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945),
staples of American cultural literacy in schools where censorship is
not tolerated. New directions point to Wright's presence or absence in
the reorientations of the Barack Obama Era, which is especially marked
by post-racial claims that paradoxically co-exist with an increasing
significance of race.
It is noteworthy, for example, that Mark Bracher's "How to Teach for
Social Justice: Lessons from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Cognitive
Science"[iii] provides a remarkable footnote on the philosophical and
psychological qualities of Native Son which can provoke "a recognition
that entails, for all white readers, the further recognition that we
are ultimately responsible for all the Biggers (white and black) and
their horrific and brutal actions" (384). Perhaps Bracher
unintentionally reifies a black/white binary formation, forgetting
that some of the Biggers among us in the second decade of the 21st
century are Hispanic or Asian-Americans or as mixed-race as a Tiger
Woods. In the context of the Centennial, Bracher's idea is a red
flag. If Bigger Thomas and other characters from Wright's fictions
are used as sociological icons without rigorous qualifications, we
risk intellectual impoverishment; we miss or dismiss the importance of
the salient points Wright made in the essay "How 'Bigger' Was Born"
regarding the origins of fictions and the No Man's Land "which the
common people of America never talk of but take for granted."[iv] One
of the more valuable lessons of Centennial activities was how lack of
skepticism about limits promotes blindness rather than insight. For
just such a reason, new directions entail remembering.
David A. Taylor's Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers
Depression American (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009) and Brian
Dolinar's "The Illinois Writers' Project Essays: Introduction,"
Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 84-90 bid us to examine Wright's use
of ethnography more closely than did Carla Cappetti's book Writing
Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993). Rereading of Wright's 1930s proletarian
poems (only "Between the World and Me" seems to get notice for its
lynching theme) and stories (Uncle Tom's Children) will beget re-
examination of Lawd Today! and the topic of spousal abuse and fresh
examination of domestic workers and organized labor in the unpublished
novel Black Hope (based in part on Wright's extensive interviewing of
domestic workers in New York). James A. Miller's excellent chapter
"Richard Wright's Scottsboro of the Imagination" in Remembering
Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009) creates a fine opportunity to investigate
Wright's perspectives on the American criminal legal system in Native
Son, Rite of Passage (1994), The Long Dream (1958), and A Father's Law
(2008). Indeed, Wright's importance in critical discussions of race,
law, and legal ethics has yet to be tapped. David Taylor's article
"Literary Cubs, Canceling Out Each Other's Reticence," The American
Scholar (Summer 2009):136-141 provides new information regarding
Wright's correspondence with Nelson Algren, and we should go to the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University) to
discover more about Wright's correspondence with Joe C. Brown and
others. Despite the biographical attention that has been given to
Wright by Constance Webb, Michel Fabre, John A. Williams, Margaret
Walker, Addison Gayle, and Hazel Rowley, much about the full extent of
Wright's intelligence and analytic imagination has not been engaged.
We should want to learn from the applications of cutting-
edge theory in W. Lawrence Hogue's "Can the Subaltern Speak? A
Postcolonial, Existential Reading of Richard Wright's Native Son," The
Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 9-39 and Mikko Tuhkanen's "Queer
Guerillas: On Richard Wright's and Frantz Fanon's Dissembling
Revolutionaries, Mississippi Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 615-642. Both
articles put Native Son and Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain
(1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957) in the present space of
terrorism, suggesting which kinds of international theory might enable
contemporary readers to absorb and digest Wright's 20th century
perspectives. Likewise, Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st
Century (2011), edited by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow,
contains fresh essays that bid us to consider how the transnational
qualities of Wright's works might necessitate some use of
transcultural theory.
Wright's uncanny intelligence and imagination, we should remember,
enabled him to warn us in The Color Curtain that
It is not difficult to imagine Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and
Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed with modern weapons, to make
the world safe for their mystical notions… (218)[v]
Ongoing re-examination of Wright's works may yet reveal other warnings
that have been ignored.
"On 'Third Consciousness' in the Fiction of Richard Wright," The
Black Scholar 39.1-2 (2009): 40-45 is a welcomed Eastern challenge
from Professor Chen Xu (Hangzhou Dianzi University) to the adequacy
of W. E. B. DuBois's thoroughly Western idea of double-consciousness.
If we embrace the probable effectiveness of "third consciousness" in
marking a certain uniqueness in African American literary traditions,
we may better understand the historical silence of double-
consciousness (or playing in the dark) in scholarly considerations of
American literatures as multicultural. We are enlightened by Howard
Rambsy's pioneering investigations of the visual "packaging," ["Re-
presenting Black Boy: The Evolving Packaging History of Richard
Wright's Autobiography," The Southern Quarterly 64.2 (2009): 71-83]
for these investigations open vistas on the dynamics of motive and
power in marketplace politics used to manage African American
literature as well as on the dominance of visual popular culture. Our
interest in Wright's use of the photograph is deepened by John Lowe's
sustained critique of Pagan Spain,[vi] ["The Transnational Vision of
Richard Wright's Pagan Spain," The Southern Quarterly 46.3 (2009)]
just as Nancy Dixon's questioning of what Wright got wrong or right
about Spanish culture in "Did Richard Wright Get It Wrong?: A Spanish
Look at Pagan Spain," Mississippi Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 581-591
reopens speculation about Wright's readings of African and Asian
cultures. The examinations of Wright's haiku by Toru Kiuchi, Jianqing
Zheng, Meta Schettler, Lee Gurga, and Richard Iadonisi in Valley
Voices: A Literary Review 8.2 (2008) and The Other World of Richard
Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), edited by Jianqin Zheng,
create yearning for fresh commentaries on Wright's early poetry and
the poetry of his prose. We now have stronger reasons, by virtue of
the testimonials provided by Howard Rambsy, Tara Green, and Candice
Love Jackson in Papers on Language & Literature 44.4 (2008) and Mark
Madigan and Toru Kiuchi in The Black Scholar 39.1-2 (2009), for asking
why and how we read or teach Wright's works, for testing the outcomes
of using those works in efforts to increase literacy (functional,
visual, cultural, political, and rhetorical) in postmodern, technology-
dependent societies. literary study. My own anxiety begins to be
replaced by optimism when I wager that new directions in the study of
Richard Wright shall arm us for our battles with a future of
globalization, that they will help us balance the "rhetoric of
carelessness" with a "rhetoric of genuine concern."
The scholarship, criticism, and theorizing that is
emerging call for remembering Wright's optimism of the brilliant one-
sentence paragraph that ends the 1945 edition of Black Boy.
With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I
headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with
dignity, that the personalities of other should not be violated, that
men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and
that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some
redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath
the stars.
[i] A good starting point for answering the question is the January
2001 issue of PMLA, which dealt with the special topic: Globalizing
Literary Studies.
[ii] Evelyn M. Simien and Ange-Marie Hancock, "Mini-Symposium:
Intersectionality Research." Political Research Quarterly 64.1 (2011):
185.
[iii] College English 71.4 (2009): 363-388.
[iv] Richard Wright, "How 'Bigger' Was Born," Richard Wright: Early
Works (New York: Library of America, 1991), 871.
[v] Richard Wright. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung
Conference. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1956).
[vi] It is unfortunate that difficulties in obtaining permission to
reproduce Wright's photographs for Pagan Spain precluded their use to
enhance Lowe's remarkable commentary.
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