Movies, Marxism, and Jim Crow: Richard Wright's Cultural Criticism

No theory of life can take the place of life. After Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones . . . He may, with disgust and revulsion, say no and depict the horrors of capitalism encroaching upon the human being. Or he may, with hope and passion, say yes and depict the faint stirrings of a new and emerging life. . . . His vision need not be simple or rendered in primer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple. The presentation of their lives should be simple, yes; but all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be there.

--Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1938)

It was when Bigger read the newspapers or magazines, went to the movies, or walked the streets with crowds, that he felt what he wanted: to merge himself with others and be a part of this world, to lose himself in it so he could find himself, to be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black.

--Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

Over the past two decades, cultural studies in the United States have emerged in complex relation to African American studies. ¹ On the one hand, as Cary Nelson remarks, "given cultural studies' heritage of recovering or analyzing working-class culture and reconstructing left cultural traditions--and given as well the prominence of race and gender theory in cultural studies since the late 1970s--the shared commitments [between the two] are clearly substantial" (Nelson, 12). According to Paul Gilroy, the preservation of the radical interventionist tradition in cultural studies depends on the close links between the two disciplines. If this radical tradition is to be retained and extended, he argues, then "the 'war of position' involved in getting Black cultural history and theory recognized as serious fields of inquiry will have to contribute a great deal to it." ² On the other hand, the two fields "pull in different directions and often threaten to cancel each other out." The institutionalization of cultural studies is always "easier to talk about than its problems with racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism, let alone the ways in which ethnicity has been mobilized as part of its distinctive hermeneutics" (Gilroy, 187). At the same time, scholars who confine Black literature and culture "within their own particular set of local, national, or nationalist concerns" not only fail to develop interdisciplinary cultural criticism, but may also fall into the habit of practicing cultural essentialism (197). While African American and cultural studies intersect in myriad ways, contradictions in this relationship continue to stand out.

This is especially true of scholarship on early African American writers. Perhaps more than any other Black writer, Richard Wright's works illustrate the contradiction. While scholars of Black and postcolonial studies embrace Wright as a foundational figure for literary discourse on race and ethnicity, they overlook or undervalue his body of cultural and media criticism. ³ Since ideological and socio-historical studies dominate Wright scholarship, even today commentary on his writings rarely touches upon cultural questions. ⁴ Despite studies on the influence of Marxism on Wright's corpus, one sees little appreciation of the depth of the author's analysis of media culture and the culture industries. At the same time, cultural critics have failed to establish links between Gramscian-based theory developed over the past two decades and the writings of major African American intellectuals like Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, all of whom explored cultural issues as well as the distinctive social and historical experience of African Americans.

I am employing the term "media culture" in this essay to refer to the mass media commercial products of the culture industries. ⁵ Douglas Kellner adopts it in a recent book to analyze...