Abstract
Starting with Richard Wright’s controversial address to the Paris Congress of Black Writers and Authors of 1956, this article explores Wright’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s focus on existential freedom as key to an emancipatory political subjectivity. Both Wright and Beauvoir reject the content of identity formed via oppression, seeking to move beyond categories of culture, religion, femininity and blackness. They argue that solidarity can be better forged across identity groups by nurturing a political subjectivity that recognizes the historical and political impact of embodied identities but is driven by ontological freedom expressed in collective action and dissociation with normative categories. Putting Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in conversation with Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we can more fully appreciate Wright’s political writing after he left the United States. Here we see the potential for solidarity across borders, and with women and other oppressed peoples. Most important, we witness these two thinkers imagining political invocations that do not reinforce political meanings given to bodies, thus allowing new forms of solidarity and collective action to emerge.
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Notes
Wright’s address to the Paris Congress is discussed by Diawara (1998) and also Iton (2008).
Wright was involved in founding the journal in 1947–1948 that was devoted to advancing the work of black writers on oppression, colonization and the black diaspora.
We also should note that Bigger’s individual acts of resistance include killing a white and a black woman.
Singh (2004, p. 176) briefly discusses Wright’s address to the Paris Congress noting that Wright advocated that US blacks and colonized peoples should act with the Bandung participants to find a ‘third way’ between the ‘monopoly capitalism of the West’ and the ‘political and cultural totalitarianism of the East’ (here Singh quotes from Wright’s The Color Curtain).
The work from Ghana, Indonesia and related lectures are collected in Wright (2008a), Black Power. The essay on Ghana titled Black Power will be referenced in this article as BP, and all page numbers will refer to this collection.
Wright (2008b), 12 Million Black Voices, hereinafter BV. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex will be referenced as SS, and all page numbers will refer to Beauvoir (2010).
The speech will be referenced in the text as TI. It is included in the collection titled Black Power (2008).
Kelley (2000, p. 23) reminds us that Négritude had many faces. The version articulated by Aimé Césaire was not strictly identified with racial essentialism and in fact was, as Kelley puts it, ‘future-oriented and modern’.
This opening is not included in the version of the essay published in White Man, Listen! but is referenced by Diawara as present in the original version.
Wright would agree with Fanon’s emphasis on the peasantry as a potential revolutionary class – this is what he had seen Nkrumah doing in Ghana by trying to mesh tradition and modernity and in fact, Wright had seen peasants and market women as the real heroes in revolutionary Ghana. He would also have agreed with Fanon’s (2004) analysis and critique of Négritude as a ‘racialization of thought’ (p. 150).
Marable (2011, p. 315) discussing Malcolm’s 1964 trip to Accra.
Gilroy (1993) demonstrates how wright links the black vernacular to an ‘emergent, global, anti-imperialist and anti-racist’ politics (p. 148).
Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for Contemporary Political Theory for making this important point.
Many of the photos that Wright took with Russell Lee, a photographer in Chicago, did not make it into 12 Million Black Voices, but are included in Stange (2004).
These images are not published, but are available, many online, in the Beinecke Collection at Yale.
I owe this insight partially to Allred (2006, p. 550), who calls attention to Wright’s voice that ‘figures readers as pupils, insisting on their blinkered relationship to blackness and demanding that they recognize African-Americans as a collectivity on the national and international stage’.
Wright does remind readers that not all blacks responded to the depression by crossing the color line to join in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Some blacks still, correctly Wright notes, saw whites as those to whom blacks must pay rent, from whom blacks receive education and health care, in other words as controlling central aspects of the lives of blacks. Yet, though they were correct in identifying a remaining and strong white supremacy, Wright says that they reacted in the wrong way: filled with a ‘naïve and peasant anger’ these ‘inarticulate black men and women’ rioted in Harlem (BV, p. 145). Why does Wright condemn the Harlem riot of 1935? Noted by Singh (2004) as the first major urban property riot (p. 64), this event was modern, too. The property riot, like the picket line, the union and engaging with the press, is a means of modern protest of the sort that Wright admires later on in Ghana, not simply a result of ‘peasant’ anger. A reviewer for this article suggested that maybe Wright has this blind spot because of his high estimation of language. Property riots ‘smash and burn’, are reactive rather than pro-active, and do not require literacy. Unions, mass marches, demonstrations, picket lines and forms of collective action that utilize language and communication are more ‘modern’ in Wright’s eyes. As we see from Wright’s book on Ghana, transforming peasants into political actors is what most impressed him about Nkrumah’s form of politics.
References
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Acknowledgements
I thank Tom Lobe, Laurie Naranch, Torrey Shanks and Lawrie Balfour for very valuable comments on this article. I am also grateful to colleagues for their comments at the 2012 Western Political Science Association Conference, and to students and faculty from the Political Theory colloquium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Finally, I thank Sam Chambers and two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Political Theory.
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Marso, L. Solidarity sans identity: Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir theorize political subjectivity. Contemp Polit Theory 13, 242–262 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.39