It's been a pleasure to be here for the last two days. So I'll refer briefly to these photos now, because I probably won't have time to really talk about them in detail. The work that Anselm referred to, are these photos going to move? they should just have a Ken Burns effect. They're not moving. Okay, well, if you could try to make them move, that would be great. So you could just cycle through them. So there's a work in the exhibition
which is called The Nucleus of the Great Union. And this work is based around 1,500 photographs that Richard Wright took when he went to the Gold Coast in the summer of 1953. Black Power, the book he wrote in 1954, the book that was published in 1954, is an intensely controversial book for many reasons. It establishes a break with the kind of redemptionist narrative of the return to Africa. So it's a break with the whole Ethiopianist tradition of Garveyism. It's also an intense epistemological inquiry about the nature of modernity, modernisation, modernism,
the conflict between what at the time people called the conflict between tradition and modernity. But it's ultimately what we would now call a kind of a Promethean text in which Wright argues for the necessity to seize the human subject, the African subject, as a kind of plastic capacity. so in this sense Wright is really arguing for prognostics more than diagnostics and I take that from Angela's brilliant talk yesterday so the work is based around the photographs that he took in 1953
which he wanted to include in the Black Power book but which his publishers didn't want I believe there was a small number published in the first British edition and the first Dutch edition but then in further reprintings they dropped away. So these photographs have been in the Beinecke Library at Yale since about 1970 when I believe the Richard Wright estate, Ellen Wright, deposited them there. So if you're part of Yale, if you're affiliated with Yale, you can get them online but if you're not, you just can't. They're just locked. So I went to the Beinecke and when you're there you can order TIFFs. and you can order JPEGs and you can take photographs with your mobile phone.
You can do all kinds of things. So the work is based around some of those, a selection of those images. And, you know, hopefully one day the entire set will be released and they'll be able to travel to Accra, to Cape Coast, to Ghana and to different parts of the continent. so if there's time I might talk about that a bit more at the end but what I want to talk about is the other thing I discovered while I was there which I didn't know about really which was the first draft of Black Power which is it's usually referred to as a travel journal
people go oh it's a travel journal, it's a rights travel journal I don't think it is, I think it's rights first draft for Black Power, it's more than 1,000 pages. It's about 1,018 pages. Because he's already titling it, he's calling it The Pathos of Distance, with the deliberate Nietzschean intensity there. He's calling it Blood and Tears, he's calling it The Land of Distance. He has a whole series of names. And when you look at that first version of Black Power, so I basically took photos in my mobile I took the photos of the whole book over a day so it's on my mobile so if anybody wants to see it
if anybody's fanatic enough come and join me so I think that book which is such a controversial book for so many reasons so many people have a love-hate relation to it and in a way that book is a kind of you can plot a path between that book from 54 and Sadir Hartman's Lose Your Mother from 2007 that's like one long kind of trajectory which we would now say is we would now say that's a kind of Afro-pessimist trajectory because in that book Wright confronts the kind of intramural antipathies
antagonisms the gaps the incommensurabilities the hostilities between African Americans and between what would become Ghanaians and Sidi Hartman's 2007 book Lose Your Mother for those who know it in a way to me is kind of the key kind of text that responds back to Wright but extends Wright in ways that he couldn't do. So what I want to do is trace in a way a simple structure between Wright's communist moment, his anti-communist
moment and his you couldn't really call it a pan-Africanist moment, a nationalist moment. so Anselm's timeline is a useful one so I'll start so it starts with a quote from the Pathos of Distance, that's my favourite title for it it is stupid hypocrisy to argue that one should discuss colonies temperately a colony exists because of the intemperate nature of man a colony is a corpus delicti and by corpus delecti he means of course the body of a crime the colony is the body of a crime
so if the locations and the entanglements of the cold war have in recent years been re-narrated beyond the binary division of the West and the East, beyond the division between Europe and the USA, beyond the USA and the USSR, and re-narrated in terms of what historians now call the global Cold War, then what confronts us today, here, is to narrate and to re-narrate the epistemological stakes
and the ontological claims, the intergenerational import and the interscalar implications of this expanded terrain, a terrain in which the multiplied entanglements, the unintended outcomes, the unanticipated implications of the practices and the publics move in and on and through what we can now call the global cultural Cold War. And this global cultural Cold War is an expanded context. It's one that would speak to Alexander's, that great moment in Alexander's talk,
in which he pointed to the way in which India was, actually it wasn't Alexander, I think it was Nidha. Nidhar's point that India was always already global. That speaks to that notion. An expanded context in which each and every new nation state in the continent, throughout the continents, throughout the Caribbeans and the Americas engendered new centers, what Wright called new terrors in freedoms, what he called new post-mortem terrors. and these terrors in freedom that's terror as in fear not terra incognita although these terrors in freedom they exceed the political geography
of underdevelopment that is typically narrated as margin and centre or centre and periphery in this expanded context there are centres that de-centre other centres and supposedly unknown figures such as Chantal Rao that Alexander referred to, these figures who were never not unknown, who turned out to be critical figures, these figures are equally well-known in specific political geographies that re-emerge in this expanded frame. And so from this dilatory context, from this surround, which is not automatically democratic surround
but is a surround that is actively unstable what I want to trace is the way in which Wright's writings Wright's writings continually seem to engender disintegrative and corrosive implications upon the fields within which they moved according to the publics that they aggravated and irritated So even though Wright is clearly celebrated as a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a critic, a short story writer, an activist, even a lyricist, he appears here as a thinker of what he called terror in freedom or post-mortem terror.
Wright was an autodidact who reshaped what he called the Marxist instrumentalities that is to say Marxist concepts that were continually remoulded to operate as a vocabulary that could shift between the modes of the psychological the expressionist, the photographic, the ethnographic and the fictional in order to dramatize and personify the terror in freedom engendered by decolonization processes which inhabit the painful temporalities between the no longer and the not yet.
This is Sadie Hartman's temporality of the no longer and the not yet. in order to study ways in which Richard Wright invented aesthetic figures that were capable of narrating the times of lives that were lived and landscapes that were imagined as worlds that could no longer be a colony but were not yet a post-colony perhaps semi-colonies in the words of Edward Kamau Braithwaite or perhaps neo-colonies it's necessary to follow some threads follow them far enough and it becomes clear that rights texts are better understood as mobilizations
as auto mobilizations as auto vehicles auto catalyzers that are compulsive cruel heretical exorbitant enthusiastic intrusive, impolite, impatient, and above all unembarrassable. Wright is fascinated by embarrassment because embarrassment is a certain exposure that he endured in the deep south, a certain force field of embarrassment, shame, humiliation, and anger which he learned to negotiate early on
and which he was attuned to. When he goes to the Gold Coast with his cameras, he's especially attuned to the moments and the encounters that embarrass him. And because he has a... Because he has a... Is that all? I can do that. All right. That's all it takes. So right when he goes to the Gold Coast, he takes two cameras. He takes a Rollerflex and he takes a Contax. And the Rollerflex is that camera that you hold at your waist. And so he looks down. So you see these pictures in which people look at his eyes
or they look at the Rollerflex. Either they look at his waist or they look at his eyes. and all the photographs we chose are the ones where people are looking back at Wright i.e. they're either looking at his eyes or they're looking at his rollerflex it's the split gaze so what Wright's work does what it makes possible is that it exerts a significant pressure upon its context that is to say Wright's enthusiastic communism embarrassed American communism's positions on all of its questions Wright's expressively
capacious anti-communism unsettles the imperatives of other anti-communisms even as it satisfies some of its edicts it exceeds and it ignores others it is a connective anti-communism that overlaps with the CCF, but is by no means containable by either. Writes Marxism, if that's the right word for it, and I think it is, offended most Marxists. His reports of encounters with Indonesian intellectuals, in his account of the Asian-African Conference, managed to offend and outrage many of his hosts. and his account of the Gold Coast Project of Nationalism
ensured that he was disinvited in advance from the independent celebrations of 1957. That's to say the right text engenders the wrong effects. It discomforts and embarrasses its settings. It is ill-fitting for the CCF magazines and the journals that continually attempted to claim his work. That's to say, talking or thinking about Wright's complication of the political fiction that we call the global cultural Cold War would entail us thinking about the politics that he fictioned, the fictions that exceeded the politics of his fictions.
in order for us to understand his critical interventions within and beyond the USA, Britain, Francoist Spain, the Gold Coast, Suharto's Indonesia, and Peronist Argentina, in order to dwell within the antagonisms, the antipathies, the antinomies, the alliances, the affinities, the complicities, the collusions and the collaborations that struggle to make meaning and struggle to imagine a political order within the treacherous instabilities and inseparabilities of intra-communisms, of multiple fascisms, of conflicting anti-communisms, of warring socialisms,
of competing black radical traditions and of ever-expanding Pan-African socialisms, it's necessary for us to return to the texts before Black Power, just to situate what's at stake in the book Black Power. Although I think this earlier version, which he called Land of Pathos, or which he called Pathos of Distance, which he called Blood and Water, or Strange in a Strange Land. I think this is one of his important works. So what I want to do in the brief time I have is to sketch the outlines of Wright's aesthetic politics.
Wright's aesthetic politics in their communist mode, in their anti-communist mode, and in their pan-Africanist socialist mode, all the while trying to hold their continuities and their discontinuities together rather than assuming that the first gave way to the second which gave way to the third because I don't think they did. So our guide through this will be the theorist and the historian Cedric Robinson. So Cedric Robinson, his great work Black Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition, ends with a long section on Wright's 1954 book, The Outsider,
which was written the same year, or was published the same year as Black Power. And Wright often talked about The Outsider while he was travelling through the Gold Coast. So these books were written in dialogue with each other, even though they seem so different. The Outsider is about this nihilistic young man called Damon Cross, this personification of a kind of intellectual nihilism. And Black Power is a singular book, an unclassifiable book, which is by no means reducible either to a travel journal, a travel book, or a memoir. And it's Cedric Robinson,
who really rethought Wright as a thinker in fiction, as a thinker who thought through aesthetic figures. And so it's a couple of Cedric Robinson essays from 1978 and 1980 which really reoriented Wright beyond the kind of... a kind of immediately literary frame of protest, which is how he was understood, of course, via Baldwin. So Robinson points out that after Richard Wright resigned from the party in 1942, although he formally left in 1944,
that one way to think about Wright's relation to communism is through an essay he wrote in 1940 called How Bigger Was Born. So that's an essay published for a magazine called The Saturday Review, and in this essay he revisits his breakthrough book, Native Son. and he attempts, he's theorizing the role of the anti-hero, Bigger Thomas, who is understood as a personification and as a condensation, not so much of society or of classes or of races, but as a figure that bears the void of the anti-social. He's a figure that embodies a de-civilizing force.
a force that desymbolizes culture, that creates a culture of no culture. Bigger Thomas bears the negation of an anti-spiritual sustenance. He corrodes the capacity of culture to engender allegiance or to claim faith. So this is right. Quote, The civilization which had given birth to Bigger Thomas contained no spiritual sustenance. had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses.
So what Wright did was try to come up with a vocabulary for these new humans who could see no symbolic system, who could recognize no vocabulary, and whose role was to be a walking cyclone that turned around the conflict lines and across the conflict lines between fascism, between communism, and between all the fascisms and communisms between. And what Wright did was to narrate what we would now call a structure of feeling. A structure of feeling that cuts across the psychic infrastructures, the moral economies, and the
racial hierarchies that support the conflict lines of racial capitalism as a form of settler colonialism, of state socialism, and state fascism. Wright said, quote, I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of bigger in America, and bigger in Nazi Germany, and bigger in old Russia. These are all bigger Thomases, white and black, tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical. certain modern experiences were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial
and national lines of demarcation and so Robinson turns to this essay to develop an argument in which Wright's characterization of a certain young black nihilism carries effects which are capable of putting pressure on communism, putting pressure on Marxism, putting pressure on the social as such. So instead of a communist reading of Bigger Thomas, what Cedric Robinson wants to do is to take the personification of Bigger Thomas and use that to undermine communism's guarantees and its self-understandings.
Cedric Robinson writes, Wright was attempting to come to terms with the psychological consequence of a historical condition of which the leadership in the communist movement was only vaguely aware. If the masses could no longer recreate the social ideologies which had sustained them, then it would not be possible for them to fulfill the historical role that Marxist theory assigned them. Moreover, the fragmentation of personality, of social relations, an ideology that Wright observed and recreated, was so total that its political and historical implications seriously challenged the presumptions of the communist movement.
Wright dramatized the process by which the structure of feeling of black experience, narrated not empirically but philosophically, philosophically and then fictionalized, puts pressure upon communism until its capacities for comprehension undergoes a process of refutation. And what is striking is that Wright is unembarrassed by the appeals of fascism. He doesn't chastise or denounce Bigger Thomas for being a figure that incarnates this appeal. It's the opposite. The fact that there are satisfactions
to be offered by fascism. The fact that fascism appeals to the generation of bigger Thomas, who is 20, this is the measure or the test that communism is obliged to contest and to compete. Why can't communism offer satisfactions that can beat fascism? Why can't it do better? What are communism's appeals? so instead of offering themselves up as a class whose allegiance to communism is guaranteed by their structure in the class system it's the opposite the black proletariat bear a force of unbelonging
that corrodes American communism's understanding of itself as the natural home for all working classes in this sense all working classes become negro insofar as they become unbound from their class it's 1944 richard wright's essay i tried to be a communist is published in the atlantic monthly it's august and then as anselm says it's republished in the anti-communist volume, The God That Failed. Just to point out, that's Richard Wright holding his hand at his belt.
The woman in between is Dorothy Pizer, Dorothy Padmore. And the smiling fellow is George Padmore, real name Malcolm Nurse. George Padmore is an ex-communist and an anti-communist but not of the CPUSA but of the third Comintern between 1930 and 1931 Padmore was based in Moscow and between 1931 and 1934 he was based in Hamburg and then the party shut him out And then he became a socialist anti-communist, a pan-Africanist socialist anti-communist.
But it's still 19, it's still 1944. And Wright is the most famous African-American anti-communist in the English-speaking world. He's the single black presence in an all-male, all-white world. characterised by figures like Arthur Kersler and Ignacio Saloni, who were friends of his. And in his text, I Tried to Be a Communist, Wright tries to explain why he was drawn to communism in the first place. He says, my attention was caught by the similarity of the experience of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred people into a whole.
here at last in the realm of revolutionary expression Negro experience could find a home a functioning value a role and this sociality of Marxism this fraternity of American communism is a proletarian solidarity and Wright's role as he thought in his eight years in the party was to provide a language, to provide images that could give a meaning to this proletariat, that could give vision and task and motivation. And Wright's aesthetic politics are captured right there.
But what I find compelling about that essay, I Tried to Be a Communist, is that reading it brings with it Wright's entire body of work, which is to say the very fact that Wright became a communist entails an indictment of the Deep South from which the 19-year-old Wright leaves in order to flee, really, towards Chicago and towards Brooklyn. So that the recantation of communism entails the question of why he was driven towards communism to begin with. And in doing so, it opens up the formulation of a totalitarianism that includes the longue durée of racial slavery,
the longue durée of natal alienation, generalized dishonor, the social life of social death endured by the death-bound subject of African-American subjectivity. in the Deep South. I think even more compelling than I Tried to Be a Communist is another novel that... It's a novel that returns to the communist moment through expressionist personification. It's his novel, The Outsider, published in 54. The same is Black Power. And obviously just two years after Black Skin, White Masks and two years after Invisible Man. These books are all in communication with each other, I think.
The Outsider is what Wright called an inquiry into the psychological condition of national oppression. And The Outsider can be read with black power, not because one is a so-called non-fiction text and one is a so-called novel, That's not as important as the fact that these books, along with Colour Curtain, Pagan Spain, White Man Listen, written all published between 54 and 57, so that's five books in three years. These books confront what Sedic Robinson calls the leading ideas and ideational systems of contemporary Western political and social thought.
rights arena was the totality of western civilization and its constitutive elements industrialization urbanization alienation class racism exploitation and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology it's clear that rights rearranged and re-rearranged the elements that make up something like an existential phenomenology of Western developmentalism. Wright used novels to re-narrate the life with and the struggle through the crises he had encountered.
The novel offered a way to pressure and to test the meanings and significances that he gave to those experiences. this is a way in which consciousness is indivisible from social theory social theory is indivisible from an experiment with ideology so I'm reaching the end now so in the essays white man listen from 1957 which are a series of lectures given in Scandinavia Norway and Sweden I think Wright says the following I maintain that the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa was to cast millions into a kind of spiritual void.
I maintain that it suffused their lives with a sense of meaninglessness. I argue that it was not merely physical suffering or economic deprivation that has set over a billion and a half coloured people in violent political motion. The dynamic concept of the void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and brutal impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful than the concept of class conflict and more universal. So what's striking here is that we can immediately hear how writers intensified, extended, augmented and generalized the void of the social that
was incarnated and personified by Bigger Thomas back in 1940. The civilization that corroded and conducts its corrosion across America has exceeded America. It had always exceeded America. It was never not global. But in 1957, what we can see is that across genres, across locations, across nations, Wright has maintained, intensified, and extended his concern with the processes of the void, of de-civilization and de-socialization, whose bewildering effects move across scales and ignore hierarchies
and elude the political order that attempts to organize and symbolize sociality as such. The effort to formulate a vocabulary has persisted across 17 years. To conclude, 6th March 57, the Day of Independence for the Nation-State of Ghana. the culmination of a process that political scientists call political institutional transfer a process that Ghana's first mass socialist party the convention people's party call self-government now a process that has lasted seven years from the first general election of 1950 in which the cpp the convention people's party beat their opponents the national liberation
movement of Ashanti, led by Wright's good friend Joseph Appiah, who appears in the first version of the Black Power draft, and who is defeated by Nkrumah, who is mentored by Wright's even closer friend, Padmore, who we saw earlier on. Padmore represents a socialist politics of anti-communism, dedicated to the de-territorialization of national borders in the project of the United States of Africa. Joseph Appiah represents an Ashanti aristocratic elitism dedicated to the retention of the chieftaincy system. Now this moment of Gold Coast's transformation
is understood by many progressives, not least of all by Wright himself, as a kind of pilot project for the new Africa. In breaking the bond to Britain, Ghana is perceived by many to lead the wave for the continent, to unleash a wave of transformation that will guide the rest of the continent, not only to independence, but to a seat at the table in the emerging post-colonial community. This transformation is not only political, but is entailed in its social, cultural, economic and personal implications.
It is a consciousness-raising enterprise. It is an ontological transformation. Yet Wright was not invited to the independent celebration. Even Richard Nixon was invited. But Wright was not. and the reason he wasn't was because he was the first to visit the Gold Coast in 53. After Wright, a whole series of political scientists all arrived in the new state of Ghana, all working on the new discipline of the comparative study of new nations. They all called themselves modernisation theorists rather than area study specialists. They all saw Ghana as a case study in political institutional transfer.
as a laboratory for the building of neo-verbarian concepts of charismatic authority. David Apter, Aristide Zollberg, Edward Shills, Henry Breton, David Austin, all men, all white American, all Ivy League. So a certain kind of American Africanism begins after Wright and forecloses Wright, whose name is never mentioned by any of these figures. Norris Padmore. And after Wright comes a second series of African-American artists and theorists and intellectuals, such as the lawyer Paulie Murray, an amazing woman whose biography was just published this year, the social scientist St. Claire Drake,
the journalist Julian Mayfield, the educator Maya Angelou, the activist and head of Ghana's television studio Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Du Bois himself, who at the age of 92 comes to Ghana to work on the renewed project of Encyclopedia Africana, a project that has taken the whole century, in which he will die before completing, but will hand over to Henry Louis Gates and the son of Joseph Appiah, Kwame Antony Appiah. It is June 21st, 1953. It's midday. Wright has been in the Gold Coast for five days he's visited two CPP rallies he's gone to the Cape Coast
he's had conversations with Nkrumah things are going well he takes his Rollerflex and his contacts camera everywhere and now he's in the International Club of Accra it's midday he's talking with writers and journalists and intellectuals Ghanaians and British, Lebanese and Syrian, Egyptian and American. Figures such as Mabel Dove, who is well known for her 1934 novel, The Adventures of the Black Girl, in her search for Mr. Shaw, which is a satirical and brilliant response to George Bernard Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl in her search for God. and as Wright says the conversation drifts over the afternoon gin
it drifts to the meaning of the global tide of industrialization that is now sweeping the earth and one Englishman, Wright does not say who it is, suggests that it was remarkable how right Hitler was and how we the allies are now going to rearm Germany to do the job that we didn't let her do then and how Hitler didn't really dislike the Jews. He just used them to unify his nation. To which Wright replies, I pointed out that such a method of unifying a nation was rather costly when six million Jews had to pay for it with their lives and they loomed a project for the extermination of the Poles. I pointed out that I had written a book about the plight of modern man
in the midst of industrial society, and that this plight was now the general heritage of all mankind, and that the real problem was what could be done to give man a place again on earth, when industrialization had cut him loose and made him an atom. I pointed out that the need that Hitler sought to fill, that is, to give modern man some kind of emotional identification, was truly a cryingly valid need. but that his method was all the more criminal for his applying such a foolish solution of racism. And then Wright adds this coda. He says the conversation was most instructive, but strikingly enough,
no one sought to apply what we were talking about to the Convention People's Party. The Englishman who was praising Hitler did not seem to realise that the same emotion, lost and whirling futilely in the human heart was being organised in a new, daring and different way by Kwame Nkrumah. And there, in that figure of emotion there's a futility that turns a futility that whirls that loses its place that figure speaks back to 1940 to the figure of Bigger Thomas as a vortex that whirls. and then Wright draws the implications. The CPP must be placed in a context beyond the realities of the Gold Coast.
Can the CPP appeal to people like him, to men like him, who have no ideas to live by except for the idea that ideas are no longer any guide? And this is what Wright means by the reality of nihilism. A reality in which it was important to grasp the idea that no ideas are really important. This is to say Wright brought the nihilism with him. He brought the nihilism that he was looking for a vocabulary for. And he thought the CPP could provide the vocabulary to re-narrate the nihilism, to re-narrate the void. But perhaps the CPP saw the void without the vocabulary.
and perhaps the two could not communicate and could not meet. And just as Alexander's point that India was positioned as a laboratory, as a case study, the careless supposition of laboratory life, so too Ghana was positioned as a case, as a problem, as a way to model a future. I don't think that's what right entirely intended, but it wouldn't be the first time right was heard as such because in right the corrosive and the engendering the vortex and the void were indivisible okay, thank you