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3 / Richard Wright’s Cosmopolitan Exile: Race, Decolonization, and the Dialogics of Modernity Is it possible that perpetual peace and cosmopolitanism are both the raison d’être of the project of modernity and its mask? —simon gikandi, “Race and Cosmopolitanism” Near the end of his lengthy confrontation with a Communist Party leader at the end of The Outsider’s fourth book, the main character, Cross Damon, finally expresses what he understands to be the true underlying historical conflicts of the age. The ravaging scourge that tore away the veil of myth-worlds was science and industry; science slowly painting another world, the real one; and industry uprooting man from his ancestral, ritualized existence and casting him into rational schemes of living in vast, impersonal cities. A split took place in man’s consciousness; he began living in the real world by the totems and taboos that had guided him in the world of myths. . . . But that could not last for long. Today we are in the midst of that crisis. (480) Cross’s prognosis about the “crisis” of modernity is one that Wright reiterated throughout his subsequent nonfiction writing, in particular in his political analysis of the decolonizing world. Wright repeatedly argued that modernity defined a profound rupture with the past of tradition, a rupture precipitated by economic modernization and industrialization —an “uprooting” of man “from his ancestral, ritualized existence.” This rupture, in turn, had cast the world in the wake of World War II and the era of decolonization into a conceptual and spiritual void; lacking a coherent social, political, and/or intellectual means of organization to take its place, both “East” and “West” remained enmeshed within 108 / peripheral forms residual traditional or superstitious ways of knowing (most significantly race and religion) increasingly incongruous with the reality of the modern and modernized world. The world was, as such, in a conceptual and political “crisis”—in a state of intellectual emergency. It is in this context that Wright critiqued the antinomies that framed the early Cold War (namely communism and American universalism) as strategic obfuscations , modern-day superstitions as it were, masking what were in reality political expressions of a will to power. Instead of confronting modernity ’s underlying “crisis” of filiation, these ideologies offered new systems of affiliation, or what Edward Said terms “counter-conversions,” that is, panaceas providing “new more complete visions that simply do away with complexity, difference and contradiction.”1 What was needed instead, according to Wright, was a way of knowing “beyond left and right,” a “new language” adequate to accurately diagnosing and ushering the world out of the “crisis” of the global contemporary moment—what Wright often referred to as a “third way of knowing.” What Wright is working out through the character of Cross Damon in The Outsider, and which he thematized formally in his turn from the novel to the genre of travel writing, is a way to vigilantly disavow the temptation of these various affiliations and instead transvalue the condition of rootless unbelonging itself into an analytic opportunity, an unassimilated and unco-opted angle of vision that could come to serve as an “emergent” model of critical consciousness. And, indeed, so much of Wright’s political, personal, and aesthetic life bears witness to this struggle. Wright was repeatedly working through and finally breaking with various affiliations (often in quite public fashion, as with the Communist Party and with the United States itself) in order to maintain and cultivate this personal, philosophical, and aesthetic state of abandonment . “I’m alone,” Wright declared. “I belong to no gang or clique of party or organization. If I’m attacked there is nobody to come to my aid or defense. Hence I must keep clear of entanglements that would stifle me in expressing myself in terms that I feel are my own.”2 In Pagan Spain, Wright is even more emphatic about his radical autonomy: “I have no religion in the formal sense of the word. . . . 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.”3 In these, and in many other statements in his later work, what Wright asserts for himself is the position of the rootless cosmopolitan—the solitary intellectual whose “heroic” independence and detachment from any affiliation enables a worldly vantage point, one that might enable this [3.145.163.58] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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