Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 10 Entering the Politics of the Outside: Richard Wright’s Critique of Marxism and Existentialism

CHAPTER 10 Entering the Politics of the Outside Richard Wright’s Critique of Marxism and Existentialism Jeffrey Atteberry But if a selfish West hamstrings the elite of Asia and Africa , distrusts their motives, a spirit of absolutism will rise in Asia and Africa and will provoke a spirit of counterabsolutism in the West. In case that happens, all will be lost. We shall all, Asia and Africa as well as Europe, be thrown back into an age of racial and religious wars, and the precious heritage—the freedom of speech, the secular state, the independent personality, the autonomy of science—which is not Western or Eastern, but human, will be snuffed out of the minds of men. —Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! Richard Wright issued an invitation to the Western world to enter a political terrain that it has historically and ideologically foreclosed , in one way or another, as outside politics. His invitation went unheeded. The West today, if not the world, can only hope that such an invitation will be extended once again, but will we know how to read the invitation if and when it arrives? Do we even have the cour- Richard Wright’s Critique of Marxism and Existentialism 249 age to read it, much less accept it? Perhaps the best preparation for facing such questions would be to revisit the original invitation. In 1956 Wright addressed the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, an event sponsored by Présence Africaine and organized by Alioune Diop.1 The invitation in Wright’s lecture, “Tradition and Industrialization” (later published in White Man, Listen!), appears near the end and was printed originally in all caps as if to avoid the possibility of being overlooked: “The West, in order to keep being Western, free, and somewhat rational, must be prepared to accord to the elite of Asia and Africa a freedom which it itself never permitted in its own domain” (100). The force of this “must” may, even still today, not sound like much of an “invitation,” but political invitations of this sort, especially when coming from the disenfranchised, are rarely festive affairs; they are “invitations” in contrast to the fearful alternatives. Wright knows perfectly well, however, that, for these very reasons, the invitation will be ignored, if not scornfully rejected. “Oh, I’m asking a hard thing and I know it,” he confesses (100). The hard things still bear asking. That such an invitation would be issued by Wright in Paris in 1956 is far from a coincidence. Paris during the mid-twentieth century was the cultural and political capital of the black Atlantic. Colonized peoples from across the globe for some time had been arriving at the metropole and were fashioning in Paris itself the very political space that Wright was inviting the West to enter. Against the backdrop of the Algerian War for Independence, international congresses were being held, conferences were organized, and journals were published. Such an environment should be considered “political” in both a practical and theoretical sense. Recently, Jacques Rancière has suggested that “The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not the confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself. Politics makes visible that which had no reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another” (par. 24). The increasingly physical appearance of the colonized world in the space of Paris at the heart of the metropole may be considered just such a lodging of one world within another. The colonized world made itself manifest, began to appear, quite materially to the world of the colonizer which had heretofore carefully controlled the form of that appearance by policing the “distance of the sensible from itself.” Rancière’s recent description, however, is only a tenuous sign that the metropole has begun, perhaps, to recognize the political space that Wright had invited it to enter, forty-five years earlier.2 Much of Wright’s lecture was devoted to describing the space 250 Jeffrey Atteberry that the West was being invited to enter, for he knew that the West would not recognize this space, even though it had been forcefully shaping that space, materially and ideologically, for hundreds of years. This lecture was not, however, his first attempt at such an endeavor. A few months before, Wright published The Color Curtain, an extended commentary on the Bandung Conference of 1955...