{"title":"Floating Facts on a Sea of Emotion","authors":"William Dow","doi":"10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Richard Wright’s journalism has been largely unexamined by Wright scholars. He has never been studied as a literary journalist and rarely placed in an African American tradition of journalism. William Dow’s chapter focuses on works that best reveal Wright as a heretofore unrecognized literary journalist: 12 Million Black Voices (1940) and a selection of his exile writings: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). It demonstrates the usefulness of literary journalistic forms to Wright as an African American writer and global humanitarian. This chapter also shows how Wright, while advancing his aesthetic aims, repurposed traditional journalism in order to promote a political solidarity with oppressed people around the world.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124530817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wright’s Afromodern Search for Political Freedom","authors":"L. Gordon","doi":"10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Lewis R. Gordon argues that Wright’s writings cast light on the suffocating world produced by colonialism, enslavement, and racism, in which black people are treated as if they simply don’t matter. Wright showed that blacks in the United States are fundamentally historically excluded from the political, aesthetic, and epistemic institutions of the only world to which they are indigenous. By pulling readers into places “they wished never to go,” he demonstrated how the erosion of black political power in fact increased political impotence among humankind. Wright, argues Gordon, was particularly prescient about the relationship between the racist state and twentieth-century fascism. They jointly eradicate conditions of political appearance and freedom, replacing them with unilateral rule.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127127455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Richard Wright’s Mission","authors":"M. Nissim-Sabat","doi":"10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Some readers of Wright’s work have criticized him for failing to portray healthy human connection or solidarity. In her chapter, Marilyn Nissim-Sabbat maintains that Wright was deeply aware that people could only live as human beings through meaningful relations with one another. Wright understood both that the human need for solidarity runs deep and that the ability to forge it can be damaged. Without such solidarity, alienation from oneself and others will crush “Bigger” and Bigger-like characters on the South Side of Chicago and globally. Wright therefore championed the healing made possible by qualitatively enlarging our lived-experience of and with one another. Essential to articulating and acting on this need is a critical theory of transcendence that is implicit in Wright’s work. Such a theory emerges in this essay through a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s views on identity politics and cross-group identity in The Second Sex as contrasted with parallel discussions by Wright in Native Son.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127752626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite","authors":"R. Wright","doi":"10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Originally published in October 1935, Richard Wright describes the immediate aftermath of black boxer Joe Louis’s victory over then white champion Max Baer. On the South Side of Chicago, thousands of black people flooded into public spaces in celebration of a moment’s racial victory, an exceptional instance of black triumph over white. Taking strength from Louis’s strength, spontaneously assembled masses of black people felt temporarily and collectively free and invincible. They shook the hands of strangers in unleashed joy and stopped streetcars. Wright thought this cyclone of celebration exhibited a pent-up black folk consciousness that was hungry for freedom, an emboldened energy that could be harnessed and channeled politically. Although soon subsiding, these desires that had long been suppressed had been uncovered in Joe Louis’s victory.","PeriodicalId":286845,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Richard Wright","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133102031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}