Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright ed. by James B. Haile III, and; Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century ed. by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (review)

Richard Wright continues to provoke, challenge, inspire, and rankle his readers: the recurring critiques of his texts as Eurocentric, misogynist, myopic, and artistically deficient remain interspersed with reconsiderations that impel us to encounter his work as if for the first time. The best current example of the latter is Abdul JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005). Tracking the consistent way in which Wright, from his earliest texts onward, explores the constitution of the “racialized” subject under twentieth-century regimes of Jim Crow, JanMohamed’s study renders Wright’s work uncanny: a seemingly familiar object in which a slantwise glance reveals a labyrinthine structure we have hardly begun to explore.

Two recent collections purport to continue this—if I may—uncanninization of Wright’s œuvre. The contributors to Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright and Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21^st Century wager on the continuing unfamiliarity of Wright’s texts: they suggest that, despite a relatively short creative period—from the late 1930s until the author’s early death in 1960—and an extensive archive of scholarly commentary, Wright’s writing continues to address modernity’s evolving histories in unforeseeable ways. The two collections turn to a number of less-explored perspectives to accomplish this.

If The Death-Bound-Subject unpacks Wright’s theory of racialization with the help of Orlando Patterson, Jacques Lacan, and Giorgio Agamben, then contributors to Philosophical Meditations situate Wright in various intellectual contexts. As the title of the collection suggests, the chapters do not primarily trace Wright’s philosophical influences—his implicit or explicit references to various thinkers—but mobilize his œuvre for the ongoing project of thinking what may be shorthanded as diasporic modernity. As James Haile puts it in his introduction, the contributors seek “to think with Wright” (xix), to locate “a method of philosophizing” in his body of work (xx).

Many of Haile’s contributors observe the existentialist bent of Wright’s thought (see especially the chapters by Haile, Lewis Gordon, Desirée Melton, and Victor Anderson); some propose innovative approaches, like Anderson with his engagement of black queer theory. Given its existentialist emphasis, the somewhat slim volume— the collection includes seven chapters, many of them brief—leaves a generous deal of work for future scholars. One of the lacunae of the collection is the still underinvestigated role that Nietzschean philosophy had for Wright, especially in his later work on the conditions of decolonization. Although frequently noted, Wright’s fascination with Nietzsche has rarely been given the sustained attention of close reading. Wright’s complete absence from such recent studies as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (U of Chicago P, 2012), and his rather brief appearances in Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin’s collection Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought (SUNY P, 2006) render this work, unfortunately not found in either of the present collections, all the more urgent.

There may also be compelling reasons to rethink Wright’s relation to Enlightenment philosophy, in all its aporias, a task that Philosophical Meditations does not take up beyond noting, via existentialism, the vaporization of reason’s promise in the morass of bad faith. Wright’s appeals to Enlightenment thought, often under Descartes’s and Husserl’s names, have been routinely coded as his misguided Eurocentrism, rather than engaged in detail. Yet Wright challenges us to think about Enlightenment reason, and its relations—extant and emerging—to the genealogies of colonization and diasporas, with the same complexity that marks Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and David Scott’s recent studies. Especially since the publication of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton UP, 2000) and The...