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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works /
Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd Today! /
A Father’s Law
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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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One Writer' Legacy: Richard Wright
and Our 21st Century
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
| The people that walked in darkness have
seen a great light; they that dwell in the
land of the shadow of death, upon them hath
the light shined. Isaiah 8.2 |
Our twenty-first century is comparable to living in the
land of the shadow of death and terrorism; no great
light is granted unto us; we have to seek such light as
is available. Richard Wright’s legacy, the published and
unpublished body of his writing, is one path upon which
one might journey in question enlightenment. Rejecting
what the world of our new century would have us believe
is reality, we have the option of reading Wright’s
legacy with deep and hyper attention and discovering the
light that actuality may provide. Such might be the
prophylaxis to protect ourselves against disinformation
and misinformation.
Reading the legacy with deep and hyper attention1
is, on one hand, an act of practiced history, of willing
to engage Wright’s writings much in the way R. G.
Collingwood recommended his fellow historians should
engage their subjects by inhabiting the minds of the
subjects. Whether such an act is felicitous in
discovering actuality is not the issue. The issue is
Wright’s commitment to understanding his world within a
lifetime from 1908 to 1960. Insofar as we might inhabit
his mind, we recognize that Wright himself invoked
histories to situate his perspectives.
His perspectives are obviously
always the past for his current readers (and those of
some anticipated future), and those perspectives may
seem to be imprisoned by the discursive limits of the
twentieth century. This would be especially true
regarding his ideas and perspectives on international
politics. These limits must be acknowledged. They need
not retard efforts to grasp the surgical consciousness
Wright developed, in part, through his reading and
incorporation of the past in his poetry, short fiction,
novels , drama, and non-fiction.
Reading the legacy with deep and hyper attention is, on
the other hand, an act that results in an eruption of
problems. Due respect must be accorded those who
question the contemporary relevance of Wright’s works.
They are usually questioning the reliability of history
as narrative rather than the validity of history as a
process of thinking. I argue, however, the relevance of
Wright’s works (like the relevance of any dead writer’s
words) is socially constructed in our notice of fragile
referentiality and in our self-conscious readings. Our
close readings and hyper-dominated readings of his works
are complicated by our ideological baggage. That baggage
does seem to influence our use of literacy as we analyze
and seek to find rational explanatory patterns in our
contemporary world. It governs our ability to observe,
judge, and reach tentative conclusions. It is Wright
that we learn to frame critical questions.
If aesthetic distance is displaced by aesthetic
intimacy, we begin to think with Wright. We begin to
sense how his flexible Marxism and fidelity to Western
assumptions strengthen belief that the past enlightens
the present with Faulknerian viciousness. We begin to
discern how much our self-interest is entwined with some
of his major themes: the permanence of rabid racisms;
capitalism’s dependency on enforcing racial inequity;
the permanence of imperial, colonial, and neo-colonial
enterprises; the non-essential nature of human identity;
the immanence of terrorism and global conflicts.
All of Wright’s works are in greater and lesser degrees
superb instances of aesthetic and political critical,
crucial thinking. They are rooted in the proletarian
imagination and modes of cognition. Janet Galligani
Casey has recently observed that Olive Tilford Dargan’s
novel Call Home the Heart (1932) “suggests that
the relation between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political’
is manifested by a constant if often implicit tension
rather than a mutual exclusivity” (245).
Implicit tension is explicit in
Richard Wright’ thought. It is indeed enlightening to
read Wright’s early proletarian poetry,the stories in
Uncle Tom's Children
(1938 and 1940), the novels
Native Son (1940) and
Lawd Today! (1963), the
novella Rite of Passage (1994) the play Native
Son (1941) the photo documentary
12 Million Black Voices (1941), and the autobiography
Black Boy
(1945 and 1991)—works Wright completed before becoming
an expatriate in Paris in 1947. Wright discovered
existentialism in Mississippi not in France. He rather
thoroughly raised questions about racism, capitalisms,
the formation of personality and identity and terrorism
and counter-terrorism American style.
He understood manifestations of
racism in the New World since the fifteenth century. He
understood what the sociologist Howard Winant tells us
in The World Is A Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since
World War II:
Race has been fundamental in global politics and culture
for half a millennium. It continues to signify and
structures social life not only experientially and
locally, but nationally and globally. Race is present everywhere; it is
evident in the distribution of resources and power
and in the desires and fears of individuals from
Alberta to Zimbabwe. (1)
Wright understood racism and terrorism do have
researchable histories. Their various manifestations may
operate either in concert or in a singular fashion at
any given time. The formation of many modern nation
states through the world is anchored in combinations of
political and economic terrorism.The contemporary scene
is brutally, inhumanely illustrated in the Middle East
and on the continent of Africa. Above all, Wright
recognized and interrogated the transmogrifying force of
such tragedies on the human personality. The recognition
quickened his interests in sociology, anthropology,
psychology, and the origins of criminality.
The works Wright created before his
death in 1960—the novels
The Outsider (1953),
Savage Holiday (1954), and
The Long Dream
(1958) and A Father’s Law (2008); the short
stories in
Eight Men (1961), the travel books
Black Power (1954),
The Color Curtain (1956),
Pagan
Spain (1957); the 817 haiku in This
Other World:
Haiku (1998); the striking essays in
White Man Listen! (1957)—the relentless problems of
alienation, moral disengagement, the power of religion,
international policies, imperialism, and lack of remorse
for acts of murder.
Wright hinted in his later works that the histories and
emerging events of Eastern and Western imperialism and
fascism can be examined as surreal, irrational, and
effective immoral acts in the service of power. The
historicized hyper and deep attentive acts which can be
our survival mechanisms, our limited salvation, draw
forth the accusative and valid and necessary questions.
We become aware that such a film as Hotel Rwanda
allows us to see the constellation formed by
imperialism, genocide, and terrorism. We begin to see
sites of reciprocal responsibility for our global
tragedy in the reactions of the oppressed and the
oppressor.
A reader who wants to explore the
consequences of Wright’s instigations can now access the
Internet. She or he can follow the branching links of
cyberspace which eventually cast light on the
appropriateness of returning to the past and
experiencing the uncanny shock of Richard Wright’s
recognitions. He prompts us to be historical in
agonizing over our lives, our destinies. His legacy in
our 21st century fosters our more active “readings” of
actuality and contemporary existence. The legacy
constitutes its own warrants for our passionate
attention.
1 See N. Katherine
Hayles's 'Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational
Divide in Cognitive Modes' in Profession 2007.
Works Cited
Casey, Janet
Galligani. “Reviving the Thirties: The Case for Teaching
Proletarian Fiction in the Undergraduate American
Literature Classroom.” College English 70.3
(2008): 233-248.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The
Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession
2007. New York: Modern Language Association, 2007.
Winant, Howard. The World is a Ghetto: Race and
Democracy Since World War II. New York: Basic Books,
2001.
January 27, 2008
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The Homestretch to the Richard Wright
Centennial /
Dr. Jerry Ward Lectures on Richard Wright
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The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers
provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers. It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
Dear Jerry,
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
is a marvelous resource! It's not like any
encyclopedia I've seen before. Already, I have spent
hours reading through the various entries. So much is
there: people, themes, issues, events, bibliographies,
etc., related to Wright. Yours is a monumental
contribution! The more I read Wright (and about him),
the more I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his
work and its impact on the worlds of literature,
philosophy, politics, sociology, history, psychology,
etc. He was formidable!
Floyd W. Hayes
Dear
Jerry,
I received my copy of
The Katrina Papers
this past weekend. I had to order it directly from UNO
Press. This is a formidable volume! You write with such
eloquence, passion, insight, and power. As survivor and
raconteur of Katrina's devastation, you give the reader
your reflections on this event; you also provide us with
informed commentaries about a broad variety of other
issues that attract your attention and the people with
whom you interact. As a student of politics, I guess I
am just overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of your
critical observations. Reading this volume and
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia,
I can comprehend not only the centrality of Richard
Wright to your scholarly project, but I also can grasp
your own intellectual power and clear vision. For
example, your critique of Robert Lashley' rant about
Wright's LAWD TODAY is the model of the art of critique.
Marvelous!
Thanks for your generous comment on my paper on
Robeson and Wright. I continue to read both of your
books. As always,
Floyd W. Hayes
Rudy, Jerry's
Katrina Papers, which I started
reading last night, is, indeed, extraordinary. It's
not a new genre, however; it's really set in the
frame of a journal—not
the 19th-century kind like that of Ida B. Wells and
of so many other, primarily women writers of that
period—but
more like the "new diary," described by
Tristine Rainer as a "journal for self guidance
and expanded creativity." In many ways it's similar
to
Frida Kahlo's journal or notebook—in
her case, designed for creative self-expression
through the incorporation of sketches, notes, and
symbols (primarily visual images); in his case
designed for intellectual reflection through the
incorporation of verbal images and symbols.
In many ways,
his journal and the "new diary" finds its postmodern
manifestation in the blog, particularly one like
Ethelbert's. The journal/new diary/blog is an
extremely flexible genre that permits the inclusion
of various other forms: poetry, Q & As, course
syllabi, dialogs, prose pieces, doodlings, sketches,
dramatic scenes, etc. I was particularly fascinated
with Jerry's piece about his body, suggesting as it
does, separation and disconnection from the "life of
the mind" that he lives. Jerry is an intellectual
par excellence with little indication in the
Papers
of his physical/pleasurable self. Maybe he'll
expand later in the book on his trips to casinos and
enjoyment of Jack Daniels. But, then, the book is
not a reflection on joy, but, as you say, of power
and clarity in the midst of disaster and depression.
Most people would have disintegrated under such
trauma. More about this later as I get my thoughts
together. Miriam
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posted 28 January 2008 |
