Thanks to Michael and to everybody at Yale for this kind invitation. It was a great pleasure to visit Beinecke in 2017 to conduct research on Richard Wright's photographs. These days it's widely known that in the summer of 1953 Richard Wright, who was by any stretch of the imagination the most renowned African American novelist in the world, traveled to the African continent for the first time. For ten weeks Richard Wright travelled through the Gold Coast, where he witnessed the Prime
Minkrumah's Convention People's Party, West Africa's first mass socialist party, as it campaigned for independence from the British. In 1954, Wright published Black Power, a record of reactions in a land of pathos. And so Wright spent 10 weeks in the Gold Coast. He left Liverpool in June of 1953, boarded the ship Accra. He arrived in Takaradi on the 14th of June. His immediate reason for visiting the Gold Coast for the first time was to attend the Legislative Assembly,
where Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah was to propose the so-called Motion of Destiny for the independence of the Gold Coast from the British Empire. In order to fully grasp the implications of the Gold Coast's revolution, Richard Wright undertook an ambitious journey throughout the colony, traveling from Accra in the south to Tomarty in the centre and Samroboy in the north. On 2nd of September 1953 Wright left Tathwaadi on the ship Papua. He returned to Paris with his 1,000 page account of his ten weeks in the Gold Coast,
which he called Pathos of Distance, a term he drew from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Moral, theology of morals. Pathos of distance was more than a travel journal. That's how it's named in the Beinecke Library. Travel journal. But it was more than that. I think, in fact, it was more than a first draft of what would become Black Power. In its insights, the account of African emancipation in the Gold Coast actually surpasses Black Power, a record of reactions in the land of pathos.
It deserves publication in its own life. And I would really be... I've thought a lot about that manuscript. It's an overwhelming, powerful work of writing. It bears equal, if not parallel weight as those other two significant works of the era, Frantz Fanon's Black Skinned White Mask and Raoul Bellison's Invisible Man, as a work of psychopolitics. Now when Black Power, a record of reaction in a land of pathos, was finally published
in September 1954, after several rewritings, Wright's account of the alienation that he experienced in the Gold Coast, challenged readers who were expecting an ode that sutured the political, ontological, social and aesthetic divergence, gap or rift, and how you name that divergence is important, but readers were expecting an ode to a certain notion of return or homecoming or motherland.
What they've done instead is a much more complex, complex, inflicted and internally contested work that has influenced several subsequent generations of diasporic intellectuals in the continent, in the US, in the UK, in Europe and the Caribbean, that have journeyed to Ghana since then and have found themselves face to face with the questions posed by Wright in 54. That means we could draw a line from Wright in 54, who said dear Harpens lose your mother in 2007.
It's quite possible to see the same confrontation with the dilemmas of diasporicity to think through the relation between certain kinds of disenchantment and disillusion. There's a request that I speak a bit louder. Now one of the reasons I was at Beinecke is that few of Richard Wright's readers in 1954 or subsequently realized that Wright had shot more than 600 photographs with his rollerflex
and his contacts cameras as he traveled throughout the Gold Coast. Wright had intended Black Power to be a photo text in which images played an equal role with words. So not identical to 12 million black voices with earlier photo text, but also not unrelated to that earlier project. but much to Richard Wright's disappointment, only 14 of his photographs, several of which he had already captioned in preparation for the publication of Black Power, only 14 of those photographs were printed. After Wright's death in Paris in 1960, his widow,
Ellen Wright deposited those 600 photographic prints and 49 contact sheets at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Beyond the Accent Community has access to to those paintings and those quantities. Few in Ghana or in different parts of the continent or in the Caribbean or the UK or Europe or the US have had the opportunity to view those photographs. Part of the projects that I embarked on
with Angelica Saga of the Ottolid Group was to return to this archive, this unseen archive, in order to compose new relations between those unseen, those largely unseen photographs and the historical texts of Black Power. Part of what was at stake was finding a means and a method for drawing out the unease and the disquiet experienced by Richard Wright in the Gold Coast. What Wright found as a journey throughout
was a certain distance and a certain distrust this trust that he encountered from members of the CPP, but also from Nkrumah's opponents, and also from the British who were still very much present in the Gold Coast and the Americans. What Wright encountered, in other words, was the Gold Coast as a key hub in a global Cold War, in which the watchful eyes and undeclared affiliations of different stakeholders in that
Cold War spoke of the trepidations of what political scientists were already calling political transfer. That's to say the process of what was called institutional political transfer from the British Empire to what would become Ghana and to what was not yet a republic meant that Wright found himself caught up in something like a crossfire of glances. So, if you will, imagine Richard Wright, picture a 44-year-old novelist, an ex-communist,
a public intellectual, a man in a suit, in several suits, with two expensive cameras, on the move between Gold Coast activists, American diplomats, British civil servants. What kind of photograph does such a person take? What scenes? What sights? What gestures? What expressions would attach his eye? If he were to direct a film, what kind of film would he be making?
Richard Wright, like all the intellectuals of his generation, was fascinated by cinema, He wrote, acted of course in his own version of Naked Sun, filmed in Argentina. If Richard Wright was a director film, what kind of film would he make? And who would he cast? So the project that the Otterleuth group embarked on tried to imagine a drama in which the photographs themselves are the actors and the extras.
extras in a world in which images would have to be understood at one and the same time as evidence as exploration as encounter and as expressionism So there is a work that the Otelith Group completed, a work called The Nucleus of the Great Union. And I'm not going to play that work now because Zoom does not handle moving images very well,
as I've found to my cost. those who would be interested in seeing such a film please get in touch and we'll find a way to share that instead i want you to hold that thought and draw it into relation with another set of preoccupations a set of preoccupations that try to draw out what it means or one way of thinking about Richard Wright during the Gold, during the Cold War, he tried to situate his relations to the Gold Coast within that global Cold War. So that means transitioning from a moment in
in 2017 to an exhibition held in 2018 at the House of World Cultures called Parapolitics. And this exhibition tried to think through the relation of Richard Wright to the so-called cultural cold war that's to say trying to think through the relation of the so-called congress for cultural freedom in relation to richard wright so what i want to do is to try to draw out richard wright as a figure encountering the global cold war in the gold coast
to a figure who moved between the overlapping worlds of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-communism. Richard Wright as a figure negotiating and navigating three positions simultaneously, Such that his moment in the Gold Coast becomes one example of that negotiation played out in those later books which I find to be extremely compelling and important and innovatory works. I'm talking about The Colour Curtain, I'm talking about Pagan Spain, I'm talking about
white man listen and Black Power to me is part of those four works which I think form a profound quartet of works. I had the pleasure of reading Pagant Spain recently and these works I think really indicate part of Wright's project to move between these to try to bridge my opening section to this broader understanding. So let's put it this way.
Returning to Richard Wright's work today requires a reading practice which attends to the rhetorical guarantees invoked by terms such as freedom, egalitarianism, Negro, containment, communism, anti-communism, Africa, redemption, the African personality, Cold War. These words are not so much concepts or metaphors, but attempts to conduct political struggles over meaning. Struggles conducted in the polemical idioms of the era.
Paul Gilroy perceptively describes Richard Wright's political position as combining a fervent anti-communism with a passionate anti-capitalism. That's correct, but what it misses is a third element that mediates between the former and the latter. That third element, it writes concern with anti-colonialism. The question then would be, what kind of anti-colonialism did Richard Wright espouse? How did his anti-colonialism relate to his ongoing critique of capitalism?
How in turn did these positions relate to the wider forms of anti-communism that sought to dominate the global Cold War? What we have to account for is Richard Wright's conflicted anti-communism, his atheistic anti-colonialism and his diagnostic anti-capitalism. What we have to do is situate these perspectives in relation to the writings that he published
in journals that were funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom between 1954 and 1958, which are the periods of time, of course, in which he's traveling to the Gold Coast, traveling to Bandung in Indonesia for that first, an Asian African conference, at the same time he travels to Spain. It's the time which his travels through Scandinavia and Germany yields the texts that will be published in White Man Listen. It's the time of the key congress of Negro African
writers of which he plays a critical role. It's the same era, 1956, in which Amos Desai resigns from the Communist Party. So this is the milieu within which which is a section in which details in close detail every encounter which you might have had with and in order to understand this project we also need to understand the very notion of this CCF itself Congress for Cultural Freedom
So he had to pit that against his relation to his friend, George Padman. In 1956, George Padman wrote the pivotal text, Pan-Africanism and Communism, The Cummings Struggle for Africa. Richard Ryden wrote the introduction to that text, Indeed, Black Power itself begins in Mornington Crescent in North London with Dorothy Padma, as Lord Padma's wife and partner, collaborated with him closely, typed his text, and in the case of Africa, Britain's Third Empire collaborated with him in production of Black
So Padmore and Wright are extremely numerous. The letters exchanged between Doriton Padmore and Ellen Wright are deeply compelling. The letters between Padmore and Wright are extremely powerful and that's another volume that deserves publication. So in order to understand what the CCF is and what Richard Wright's collaboration is, we need to understand the two notions of the non-communist left, the anti-communist left,
and how Richard Wright positions himself in relation to these two notions. And indeed we need to understand what these terms even mean. What we could say was that the leading intellectuals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom struggled to differentiate their project of the so-called non-communist left from the right-wing anti-communism championed by senator joseph mccartney throughout the 50s so we have to reconstruct the ideological formation of the non-communist left in the early years of the cold war in order to understand how
right was the the earliest and most significant african-american writer recruited by the non-communist left as a kind of morally preeminent figure. And to do this we have to go to the writings of Arthur M. Rettinger, Jr., who isn't read so much now, but who in 1949 published a text called The Vital Center, The Politics of Freedom. This is the text that characterizes what was understood as the non-communist left. The non-communist left are the matrix of ex-communists who wish to roar right into their circle.
So Schlesinger argued that there was a functional equivalence between fascism and communism, which required critics to rethink the vocabulary inherited from the spirit of the American and French revolutions. The rise of fascism in communism, he believed, meant that in certain respects, totalitarian state, single party, the leader, the secret police, police, fascism and communism are more like each other than they are like anything you can speak. So what Schlesinger argued was that there was no, there was not a line between the left and the right,
but a circle in which fascism and communism meet at the bottom. There was a circle. And in this circle, The fascism and the moderate right are side by side against communism and the moderate left. The moderate right and the moderate left are side by side against fascism and against communism. And so this idea, and so Schlesinger diagrammed this notion in which he tried to reformulate the idea of left versus right in terms that corresponded
to what he called the complexities of this Garthi center. What the Beissel center actually did was to create a functionalist analogy that erased capitalist imperialism, systematic exploitation of the dependent territories, such as the Gold Coast or Indonesia, from the political imagination of the Cold War. The idea was to make it impossible to foreclose the understanding and the comprehension of what George Padmore, the Trinidadian Marxist theorist,
the mentor of Armin Kruger, called colonial fascism that was perpetrated by the imperial powers throughout Africa and Avon. Padmore, like Wright, had been a communist. He was a former editor for the Negro Worker. in Harlem, unlike, sorry, in the USSR, unlike Wright, Padmore had worked with and for the Communist International in Moscow from 1930 until his break with the party in 1933. So Padmore's anti-imperialist, anti-communism
expressed in his development of the theory and practice of Pan-African socialism in books that began with how Britain ruled Africa and concluded with Pan-Africanism or Communism, the coming struggle for Africa, that informed Wright's own thinking and provided Wright with a political vocabulary for fashioning an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-communist perspective that cut across the imperialist legitimation celebrated by Schlesinger Jr. in the vital centre. So in the foreword to Pan-Africanism or Communism, Wright sought to clarify Padmore's anti-Stalinism
from that of the non-communist left, and in doing so, the clearest space for his own thinking. thinking. This is Richard Wright. When George Padmore discovered that beyond doubt Stalin and his satraps looked upon black men as political pawns of Soviet power politics to be maneuvered in Russian interest alone, he broke completely with the Kremlin. And then in capital letters, Richard Wright writes the following words, but his breaking did not mean that he then automatically supported the enemies
of the Soviet Union. And his refusal to support the enemies of the Soviet Union was not dictated by any love for Stalin. No, the big exclamation mark. No, writes Richard Wright. He continued his work alone, striving to achieve through his own instrumentality that which he had worked for when he was in the Comintern hierarchy. That is freedom for Black people. So what Wright is arguing is the F. Wright is arguing for the autonomy of Black internationalist
struggles from within the global Cold War. And what those capital letters point to is the effort required to clear a space for Padmore's anti-colonial program of Pan-Africanist socialism, which required it to be differentiated from the automatic assumption that anti-Stalinism entailed a support for capitalist imperialism and the equally wide-held belief that anti-capitalism presupposes a support for Stalinism. These assumptions popularized by the non-communist
left, promoted by Schlesinger in a book like The Vital Center, effectively worked to exclude pan-Africanism's anti-colonial anti-capitalism from the political imagination of the global cold war. What this means is that from 53 right the way through to his death in 1960, Richard Wright's essays, his articles and his books from Black Power onwards aim to expand the political imagination of African, Asian and Black American autonomy beyond the limits to the imagination promoted by the social rights.
That's part of the project of Richard Ryan. That's what is crucial to grasp about his anti-colonial, anti-capitalism. and the conference. Now I have a long section which I'm going to cut to, I'm going to cut right to the end and draw the conclusion based on Richard Wright's final speech which is only available to this day at the Binary. Since the Binary Key of Extended is an invitation, it makes sense to to highlight this moment in my text, which is the kind of concluding section of the text.
So, cut out the time and the second. But there's a relation between Wright's position in 1956, Wright's position in the Gold Coast in 1953 and Wright's position in the final year of his life in 1960. What I've tried to do is sketch out three brief moments, 1953, 1956 and now 1960. So in Wright's final public lecture, The Position of the Negro Intellectual in American Society, another text that requires publication, delivered at the American church in Paris on 8th November 1960, 10 days before his death,
Wright carefully articulated the literary, political and psychological implications of the gulf between Cold War ideals of democracy or justice or progress and their insufficiency when those ideals confront the existence of America's 12 million Black voices. What Wright wanted to grasp was the extent to which the Negro represents a paradox, that's his phrase. Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the entire tide and direction of
of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it is felt to be wrong to admit him freely. What Richard Wright grasped from his position in Paris was that American capitalism's attachment to tethering and banishing the Negro to and from the body politic of the USA, continued the logic of exclusion and inclusion, pioneered by 19th century imperialism's international law. That's to say the native subjects contained by imperialism
within Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and South America were subject to similar conditions as Americans in the 20th century, who were excluded from the full rights of membership, while they remained subject to the obligations of inclusion. And this double inscription of exclusion from rights of membership to being subject being subject to the obligations of inclusion, operated at the scale of the international and the so-called domestic. So what it's possible to see,
and this is, I owe to the work of the writer Nicole Waligora Davis, that Richard Wright's exile, voluntary exile in Paris after 1947 brings home to him the extent to which the geographical distance between himself and the United States paled in comparison to the state-supported Gulf dividing black people and the larger U.S. party, that's Walagora Davis. And this is right. This is his key formulation in his position of the Negro, Intellectual and American Society.
The values of democracy, justice, progress, and religion are not realities that we can take for granted. The distance that separates the Negro from these values resulted for Wright in a disenchantment towards the signifier of freedom, from what it was supposed to signify. That the safe freedom failed to signify for Black American intellectuals and Black Americans in general, as it did for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Wright's understanding of the non-communist left allowed him to interpret the failed performativity
of freedom in ways that eluded the notion of a vital centre. What Wright understood was that terms such as democracy is not something that we know about or have lived, but a value which we are trying to wring in the form of concessions from reluctant and grudging whites. Justice is not a clear-cut concept for us, but something that we are trying to make whites Let us share. An amazing and profound insight.
For Black Americans, Wright is saying, democracy's history as a value has proven itself to be unreliable, capricious, untrustworthy and treacherous. Wright emphasizes that, quote, our inability to assume that these values will or can work depends upon the whims or moods or laws of the white men who rule the Western world. To his audience on that night in Paris in 1960, What Wright articulated was Black Americans' long-standing lack of faith in the value of such ideals.
And this loss of faith, this faithlessness, was based on an intimate acquaintance with the discrepant histories of those ideals and those values. Wright's painful insight into Black people's intimacy with the lawlessness that called itself the law undermined the Congress for Cultural Freedom's efforts to treat democracy or freedom as a standard that could command automatic allegiance. Simone's arguments influenced his friend, Simone de Beauvoir. In 1950, her text, America
Day by Day, developed these arguments on the paradox of inclusive exclusion. Simone de Beauvoir comes to America on a university tour and is struck by white capitalism's persistent attachment to criminal impunity, licensed illegality, both of which exposed the lives of black Americans to arbitrary danger. The drawing explicitly on Richard Wright, the Beauvoir asserted that, quote, the democratic character of the American judicial system in which judges and the police are often elected can be a good thing in a homogenous society,
but it becomes a grave danger to democracy in a society in which political participation is restrained and in which one caste traditionally oppresses another. under the racial caste system of the US, what Beauvoir saw was, quote, the minority without political power finds itself defenseless in the face of the court and the police. The result is that the black man is constantly in danger from whites. So Beauvoir's attention to the ongoing histories of white juridical endangerment grew directly
on Richard Wright's own thinking. So I'm going to cut one section now and then conclude. By 1960, Wright had come to the realisation earlier than most that the Congress for Cultural Freedom's secretive funding structure entailed state support, as was later the case, of course, as was revealed in 67 as CIA support, in fact, famously so. Wright's insight into a secretive funding structure
of the CCF, his suspicion, combined with his sensitivity to the US state ongoing surveillance of his daily life in Paris, led him to develop a vocabulary attuned to widening levels of national deception, international duplicity, and global stimulation. He argued that the Americans now do all of their important work through the non-communist left, which operates through an anti-communist left, which they have bought and which they control. And so this is Richard Wright's diagram
for understanding the political geography of the global Cold War at the start of the 1960s, a world in which the autonomy of decolonization struggles to operate within and beyond the flexible apparatus of containment, that's the American term, mobilized by the US national security state. What Wright saw was that government-sponsored revolutionary movements could reposition the non-communist left and the anti-communist left as variations of neocolonialism. And to conclude, Wright draws his final moment from the position of the Negro artist and intellectual in society with a paraphrase from Shakespeare's Macbeth.
A paraphrase that offers a final, fatal political diagram for comprehending the confounding contestations and unwitting convergences between competing anti-colonialisms, contending anti-capitalisms, and conflicting anti-communisms. Richard Wright differentiated his own position from each of these perspectives by turning to Macbeth's despairing account of the intrigues and machinations of statecraft. All of these efforts appeared in the light of Lady Macbeth's suicide to have been futile,
little more than a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury. In November 1960, the global Cold War appeared to Richard Wright as a bifurcated world of arcana imperie, in which the mysteries of government legitimized the powerful foundations which claimed to be beyond the state and outside the market, which claimed to enlist black artists and intellectuals into prestigious networks that in actuality compromised their ideals, corrupted their promise and conscripted their values.
What Richard White discerned was a cold, contained, occluded world, encapsulated in its most concentrated form as what Wright called a tale told by betrayers, full of double-crossing, signifying deceit.