CHINA IV
“Most of the people
of China live on low land near the sea and near great rivers….Tea plants grow
in the hilly parts of China.”
Alexis Everett Frye, First Course in Geography (1907)
Each trip to China is
a teachable moment, an illumination of puzzles, a sojourn in a land where
ancient and contemporary poetry is treasured.
Q: Is East Lake more beautiful than West Lake?
A: Both are quite beautiful. Neither is as beautiful as the lake of the
Jade Emperor (Yu Di).
As an
overseas professor at Huazhong Normal University (Central China Normal
University) in Wuhan, I have deep interest in exchanges between the People’s
Republic of China and the United States of America, in promoting the mutual
destruction of stereotypes. For remarkably different reasons, both nations
manufacture disinformation to protect their roles in world affairs and to
protect their citizens against the destructive power of TRUTH. As both nations move unequally toward
becoming models for the future of humanity, the idea of a future exposes the
despair we ought to avoid.
My job is
to share knowledge about African American literature and cultures with my
Chinese colleagues and the students who take courses in the School of Foreign
Languages. I try to clarify for them
(and for myself) the historical contradictions of capitalist desire. In return, the Chinese provide diverse
examples of dangers associated with rapid modernization and insufficient
attention to sustainability and the ecological and psychological dimensions of
growth. Yes, the Chinese are far ahead
of most of the world in the use of wind power as an alternative to fossil
fuels; on the other hand, their efforts
to make Wuhan a world-class industrial center may eventually make the city
unfit for human habitation. Excessive
pollution may decimate people as overpopulation drives them to urban madness,
the bane of Western cities.
My
fourth trip to China deepened my sense of political and ethical differences; of
how an uncritical embrace of the myth-dripping West might oil a path to a state
of being post-human; of the power and relentless determination of “antizens;”
of how the inhumane neo-colonial imperatives of both the East and the West
poison dreams of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” on the continent
of Africa; of Richard Wright’s foresight in suggesting in White Man, Listen! “that the West is ethically dubious when it
urges upon Asians and Africans concepts or principles that the West discovered
only accidentally and under conditions far different from those that obtain in
Asia and Africa;” of why both the Chinese and the Americans need to absorb the
dialectics of Frantz Fanon.
Lectures in China
To
address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at
Chinese universities, I have given lectures since 2009. Chinese auditors, however astute and savvy
they are, may be easily confused by the literary critical games played in the
West. Often they do not understand the
cultural dynamics of academic trends.
Why do Western critics so dread the
absolute, the essential, and the certain?
The reasons, of course, are at once philosophical, racial, and
political. One must exercise care in
explaining that the universal is not
universal but merely a smokescreen for intellectual hegemony, that deconstruction can too often be a
weapon of massive destruction.
During
May and June 2012, I presented nine lectures designed to plant seeds for
critical growth. The listing includes a
post-delivery comment for each of them.
1) Trickster Criticism: Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?---
In international forums for literary study, it is necessary to have a critique
of Warren’s tendentious misreading of African American literary history and
culture and its probable consequences of such misreading in a future of African American literary
study. I am indebted to Maryemma Graham
for drawing my attention, after I returned to America, to an important example
of a consequence: Gruesz, Kirsten Silva.
“What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA
127.2 (2012):335-341.
2) The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey
---Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions.
To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper
perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The
Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012): 97-106. Access http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/spring/jeffers-contemporary-poetry
3) The
Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary
History – This commentary seeks to explain the inevitable absence in
literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and
sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed.
4) On Reginald Martin’s Idea of Transcultural
Theory –This discussion of Martin’s appropriation of transcultural theory
as a method of reading texts foregrounds the need to make clear distinctions
among theory, methodology, and method.
5) The Tonal Drawings of Asili Ya Nadhiri:
Temporality and Musicality – Given the absence of critical attention to how Nadhiri uses oral/aural memory , grammatical
innovations regarding tense, ideas about music and art, and some problems of
time and being dealt with in theoretical physics in a conceptual poetic genre, this lecture
acknowledges his unique contribution to African American poetry.
6) Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism
–A discussion of Reed’s sustained
efforts since the late 1960s to promote real rather than lip-service
multiculturalism in the literature of the United States, this lecture suggests
that Reed has provided a rich matrix for the delayed conversation on what it
means to be an American.
7) Acknowledgement: The Contact/Combat Zone
---A meditation on the function of the literary critic in the 21st
century, this lecture argues that warfare is the dominant but rarely acknowledged
trope in discussions of the literature of the United States.
8) Richard Wright and Twenty-first Century
Questions ---The purpose of this lecture is to argue that significant
research questions and making of transcendent connections (imaginative reflection)
can be derived from close reading of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro
Writing” and his novella The Man Who
Lived Underground.
9) American
Literature and Digital Humanities ---This lecture involves a series of
speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of
literature, especially of African American literature.
I have little
interest in fashionable academic games, efforts to avoid telling a truth about
the essential complexity of African American literature and its continuing
evolution, or rhetorical lies about the existence of shared values among
diverse citizens of the United States or Europe. To promote honest exchanges among Chinese and
American intellectual communities, I embrace an unfashionable humanism that minimizes
post-human dominance. I want my Chinese colleagues to have more options for
making conclusions about truth.
I do want them to grasp what the following
blog on Toni Morrison’s most recent novel does not say. I want them to
understand why Morrison rather than Jesmyn Ward or Tina McElroy Ansa or Tayari
Jones is the target of commentary:
Morrison, Toni. Home. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
The
Nobel Prize in Literature is the most prestigious award the West offers to
writers, but one might ponder whether it is a curse or a blessing for those who
earn it. Does a writer’s creative powers
decline or hibernate after she or he receives the award? No. The prize is not meant to cripple the human
spirit. Reasons for strong difference in
quality must be sought elsewhere.
Judgment
is so privatized and relative in the twenty-first century that it matters very
little if a reader says “Yes” or “No.”
Value is a pragmatic commodity.
It has the stability of a theorized subatomic particle. Only a statistically insignificant portion of
the world’s population gives more than a few seconds of thought to the growth
or stasis or decline of the writer’s imagination. No writer can maintain stellar performances
over several decades of doing things with words.
But prizes create unreasonable
expectations. Writers who possess them
are often more harshly judged than their peers who create excellent works in
oblivion.
Such is
the case with Toni Morrison since she won the ultimate literary prize in
1993. Not even the protective circle of
the Toni Morrison Society can deflect barbs of disappointment, the weird
neutrality one feels after reading Home
(2012). When you compare it with earlier
novels ---The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, or Jazz, you
think the early works have the signature richness and depth of songs by Etta
James, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughn. Paradise, Love, A Mercy, and Home
are good. They are attractive explorations of what is cruel. They are not,
however, overwhelmingly exciting novels. They are like the singer who scored
number one on last week’s pop chart. You are disappointed that these later
works do not light your fire.
Bernard
Bell aptly claimed in The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition that Morrison’s fiction was marked by poetic
realism. In Home, realism has been displaced by some ironies of postmodern
poetry. Its plot is recognizable but
thin. Morrison indulges her entitlement to grieve in an opaque fashion. The narrator’s language floats above the
story’s engagement with obscene racism, because Morrison contemplates her
cleverness in the use of language more than she uses language to provoke
consciousness of America’s social and cultural filth –systemic brutalization of
black sensibility, medical experimentation on black bodies worthy of a Nazi
doctor. Its examination of manhood in post-Korean War America
focuses on the fragility of male subjectivity, while its portrayal of boyhood displays remarkable
strengths. Superb imbalance. The protagonist Frank Money nurtures too much
grief and self-pity. “In Frank Money’s
empty space real money glittered” (84). He is truly not “some enthusiastic
hero” (84). When the language of the novel
is not laughing at the reader, it is sweating the reader. It invites hostility and displeasure. In other words, reading Home requires admitting the validity of a remark made by Joan
Zhang, a Chinese graduate student, about Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “…it is only through removing the mask of ‘the
feminine mystique’ that female blacks can achieve their growth; it is only
after female blacks’ growth that male black’s growth becomes possible; it is
only with the growth on both sides that males and females can live
harmoniously, which is the essence of Walker’s ‘womanism’ .“
We should
have respect for Morrison’s achievements.
Scholars are obligated by literary history to read her writings –all of
them. But scholars, like casual readers,
do not have to like all of her work. They are free not to tarry in the new
“home” she has constructed.
Learning and Teaching: The Core of Cultural Exchanges
It is
relatively easy to present lectures in China, especially if one maximizes the
conversational mode. Speak plainly. Explain fully. Avoid jargon and convoluted sentences. For a
foreigner, teaching in China can be a remarkable challenge.
During
the eight weeks of teaching twentieth-century American literature to graduate
students, I had to modify my style of teaching.
In America, many graduate students delight in being vocal, in displaying
their opinions, and in provoking their teachers. Engagement with the instructor is
commonplace. In China, most graduate
students are disarmingly respectful and silent.
Yes, they will ask questions after a class session, but they are very
content to listen carefully and take notes.
The professor’s authority is beyond challenge. Such behavior is ideal if the professor
thinks a lecture is the best way to impart knowledge. My teaching style is discussion-driven,
because I do not want to be the only voice in the room. I need to know if students are confused by
some of my statements. I need evidence
that my students are thinking critically about the subject matter. Are they resisting propositions about various
pieces of literature? I found the absence of rich conversational exchange to be
annoying. I was forced to lecture.
I
discovered the traditional method of Chinese teaching can have good
results. My students were required to
submit a 4-5 page essay on Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been?” on June 29. To increase
the probability that students would make the best use of the work they do in
their concentrations –--literature, linguistics, or translation, I gave them
three options.
Option A: Translation students will write an essay on the
difficulties of translating selected passages from the story.
Option B: Linguistics students will write an essay on the
function of grammar, syntax, and diction in the narration of the story.
Option C: Literature students will write an essay on how the
use of symbolism in the story creates a selective vision of American society in
the 1960s.
The translation and linguistics students produced the best
papers, because they used the theories from their sub-disciplines to focus
their thinking. On the other hand, many
of the literature students found it difficult to focus on how symbols might
function. I got the impression they had
inadequate training in how to write about literature according to Western
criteria. I chose not to penalize them
for what they had not been taught about avoiding plagiarism by carefully
documenting all sources they used.
In the future, I will make use of
what my friend John Zheng, an alumnus of CCNU and a professor at Mississippi
Valley State University, advises:
“Students at CCNU need to be told before
class what they are supposed to do and they will have to speak or participate
in exchanging ideas. Or next time you tell them that discussion takes a big
percentage of their grade. They like to listen, but you may not know what they
think. They may be shy or afraid to be laughed at by peers. When I was there I
forced them to talk, to participate and to make oral presentations. And I also
found two heavily plagiarized the Internet essays. Maybe assign a piece to each
and come to talk about it in class. I also said each reading will be tested so
everyone had to read.” (Email from Zheng, July 11, 2012)
In
the future, I will concentrate of creating an atmosphere for discussion-rich
class sessions and on teaching critical thinking about literature. In the future I will draw upon the very
pleasant experiences I had in my seminar for Ph.D. candidates as we discussed
how to conceptualize and do research for their dissertations. We talked about
James Fenimore Cooper’s sea fictions, the novels of Ernest J. Gaines, Gish Jen,
John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, Richard Wright’s quest for a
conversational path beyond races and cultures, and the dramas created by
Suzan-Lori Parks. It is a blessing (a
slice of blissful meat) to talk with Chinese Ph.D. candidates who force me to
remember virtually everything I have ever learned.
Much of my future work will be
dedicated to helping Professor Luo Lianggong to develop a distinguished program
for the study of African American literature and culture within the School of
Foreign Languages at CCNU. He and I
have already begun discussing how to lay the groundwork for such a program, one
that must give a great deal of attention to pedagogy ----teaching post-graduate
(master's level) and Ph.D. candidates how to acquire the necessary historical
background information for making astute interpretations of African
American literature and how to grasp the nuances (linguistic aspects and
implications of speech act theory) that secure the distinctive difference of
African American literature. Having had direct experience with teaching
students in a foreign language (English), I am convinced that pedagogy is
crucial. It is pedagogy that will be central in what I do at CCNU in the spring
of 2013.
Lectures, small conferences and workshops for Chinese teachers, exhibits and musical performances will eventually be incorporated, but having African American texts (books, videos, and so forth) available for teachers and students in Wuhan is more important. My informal assessment of CCNU library holdings suggests that we must try to acquire more African American primary and secondary texts. Three examples: 1) One student is determined to write her dissertation on Sonia Sanchez, but she has no way of accessing Sonia's earliest publications; 2) I want to teach a special seminar on Richard Wright, but the library does not have copies of the Library of America early and later works; 3) if someone gave a lecture on the Harlem Renaissance and the novels of Wallace Thurman, it would require a major effort to make it possible for students to do a follow-up reading of Thurman's Infants of the Spring against Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven. I stress these practical issues to illuminate the importance of balancing the acquisition of materials with the teaching of African American literature and culture.
My work as a Famous Overseas Professor is unofficially an outreach effort of the Project on the History of Black Writing, and I shall be asking many of my American colleagues for assistance with acquiring books. My very wise and energetic friend Maryemma Graham, of course, provides the much needed support to keep me focused on my commitments.
Lectures, small conferences and workshops for Chinese teachers, exhibits and musical performances will eventually be incorporated, but having African American texts (books, videos, and so forth) available for teachers and students in Wuhan is more important. My informal assessment of CCNU library holdings suggests that we must try to acquire more African American primary and secondary texts. Three examples: 1) One student is determined to write her dissertation on Sonia Sanchez, but she has no way of accessing Sonia's earliest publications; 2) I want to teach a special seminar on Richard Wright, but the library does not have copies of the Library of America early and later works; 3) if someone gave a lecture on the Harlem Renaissance and the novels of Wallace Thurman, it would require a major effort to make it possible for students to do a follow-up reading of Thurman's Infants of the Spring against Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven. I stress these practical issues to illuminate the importance of balancing the acquisition of materials with the teaching of African American literature and culture.
My work as a Famous Overseas Professor is unofficially an outreach effort of the Project on the History of Black Writing, and I shall be asking many of my American colleagues for assistance with acquiring books. My very wise and energetic friend Maryemma Graham, of course, provides the much needed support to keep me focused on my commitments.
My very satisfying experiences
with my Chinese colleagues will help to shape my future as an independent
scholar, now that I have retired from Dillard University. The future has begun with almost daily
correspondence with these colleagues and fulfilling their requests for
information or advice about their projects or for letters of recommendation. The future involves my c circulating emails
to build new bridges between Chinese and American scholars and students. The following is an example of what I shall
broadcast in the future.
July 22
Dear Friends,
My colleague Zuyou Wang, editor of the bimonthly Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal, requested that I ask you to consider sending articles to his journal. He also suggested that my article on Wright, which appeared in a recent issue, be used as a model of submissions. I have pasted it below.
When I wrote the article, I struggled (1) to make the ideas rather uncomplicated for the Chinese readers who are interested in teaching American and African American materials and (2) to provide ideas that can be translated into research projects or used in the classroom.
As some of you already know, I am devoting time to promoting greater interest in African American literature and culture in China. I am grateful to Professor Wang for helping me with that undertaking. It is a good move for more of us to participate in critical exchange with Chinese teachers and scholars. Thus, if you have a relatively brief article that you deem appropriate, please send it to Professor Wang at
wiziyi@gmail.com
With all best wishes,
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Famous Overseas Professor
Central China Normal University
My colleague Zuyou Wang, editor of the bimonthly Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal, requested that I ask you to consider sending articles to his journal. He also suggested that my article on Wright, which appeared in a recent issue, be used as a model of submissions. I have pasted it below.
When I wrote the article, I struggled (1) to make the ideas rather uncomplicated for the Chinese readers who are interested in teaching American and African American materials and (2) to provide ideas that can be translated into research projects or used in the classroom.
As some of you already know, I am devoting time to promoting greater interest in African American literature and culture in China. I am grateful to Professor Wang for helping me with that undertaking. It is a good move for more of us to participate in critical exchange with Chinese teachers and scholars. Thus, if you have a relatively brief article that you deem appropriate, please send it to Professor Wang at
wiziyi@gmail.com
With all best wishes,
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Famous Overseas Professor
Central China Normal University
For
Shandong Journal of Foreign Language Teaching
“Directions in the Study of Richard Wright”
Contemporary studies in languages and literatures are
marked by varying degrees of anxiety. The impact of new technologies on the
uses of language can be noted in the alacrity with which many people engage one
another in social networks. Users, particularly in the United States, instant
message, tweet, text-message, or post items on Facebook in forms that contrast
dramatically with traditional uses of standard American English. People who
have been trained to attend carefully to spelling, grammar, syntax, coherence,
and unity of ideas may find themselves either amused or dismayed or confused by
the new forms of communicating. On the other hand, people who have little
regard for accuracy or nuances in communication willingly embrace what might be
called“rhetoric of carelessness.” They seem to be convinced that playful
inventiveness is the future, that linguistic conventions are arbitrary, and
that minimal representation of thought is the ideal. Thus, it is to be expected
that some scholars and teachers fear that new habits of writing and reading
will undermine the desire or ability of younger generations to make critical
judgments about literature. These new habits eschew the discipline and patience
necessary for analysis and interpretation of literature. They cannot be
dismissed as trivial, because they are fundamental in changing what counts as
knowledge.
Anxiety about literature and language is intensified by
ambivalence regarding the changes that accompany the progress of globalization.
Those changes influence how we speak of a large range of topics: emerging world
orders, ecology, biocultural transformations (including shifts in the cognitive
functions of the brain), and the cultural studies that have displaced or
subsumed what was once called literary theory and criticism. Even if we try to
be empirical and scientific in our approaches to the study of literature, we
still have the onus of being uncertain in efforts to generate appropriate
questions for our investigations of twentieth-century American writers. We are
overwhelmed by our options; we choke on our wealth of information. We are
frustrated by global theories that dismiss the importance of nations and
national boundaries (which are also cultural boundaries) that have been so
critical in the growth of American, or to be more accurate, United States
literature. Much depends on how one conceptualizes globalization in the study
of literature, or answers the question: what is globalization?[i]
Is globalization primarily a way of thinking about
historical processes, or is it a conviction that post-modernity has succeeded
in compromising our ability to locate ourselves and our cultural expressions in
a history that can be verified? These questions do not have simple answers.
Theory notwithstanding, we can be sure that twentieth-century literature is
indelibly marked by national origins. It is unethical to pretend that older
works can or should be read as if they were written under the conditions of
electronic revolutions. Globalization may make us sensitive to the metaphor of
the uncertainty principle, but it neither can nor should erase historical
consciousness in literary and cultural studies. Historical consciousness
existed to prior any newfangled global consciousness. Cautionary hypotheses
ought to govern directions in the study of the literature of the United States
or of any nation-state. Awareness of the limits of knowledge is crucial, for
example, in the study of Richard Wright (1908-1960).
It is remarkable that many contemporary studies of
Wright’s works tend to recycle old ideas about “universal” themes, naturalism,
modernism, the writer’s ideology and political intentions, and the much
overworked notion of “double consciousness” as an innate feature of African
American thought. The more progressive or future-oriented studies, however,
attempt to be interdisciplinary. They may adapt some version of
intersectionality research, which “is defined principally by its focus on the
simultaneous and interactive effects of race, gender, class, sexual
orientation, and national origin as categories of difference in the United
States and beyond”(185).[ii] Studies that borrow from
intersectionality theory have the potential of making us more discriminating in
our investigations of Wright’s works. They can assist us in distinguishing
between which of his works have immediate productive relevance (the
potential to provoke synchronic thinking about contemporary human issues) and
those which have reflective relevance (the potential to invite
diachronic thinking about change). For example, Wright’s novella “Down by the
Riverside” provokes thought about human behavior in the aftermath of natural or
man-made disasters; in contrast, Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices
may invite thought about the historical consequences of migration and
urbanization, whereas Black Power may urge us to ponder the vexed
outcomes of twentieth-century liberation struggles in the post-colonial African
nation of Ghana. It is reasonable to argue that future studies of Richard
Wright and other American writers of his generation should examine both the
writer’s and the reader’s assumptions about the function of literature in his
or her own time. It is illuminating to know whether harmony or discord is more
prominent. Otherwise, we shall only compound anxiety and confusion about what
makes literature relevant in the contexts of globalization.
Directions in the study of Wright are most valuable when
they are aligned with questions about what his works reveal or seem to predict
about human beings and change. For what revolutions in human thought do
Wright’s works continue to be germane? Does the impact Wright wanted his
fiction and nonfiction to have still affect us? Will continuing study keep
interest alive?
Explorations associated with the 2008 Richard Wright
Centennial allow us to sketch how Wright scholars have begun to reposition
their engagements with his published and unpublished works and how those works
may assume new significance for readers and thinkers. The celebration of
Richard Wright as an internationally honored citizen of the republic of
American letters and culture did not officially conclude, at least for those
who respected the wishes of the Richard Wright Estate, until November 28, 2010,
the fiftieth anniversary of his death. This conclusion, however, was a
resumption of efforts to secure memory of Wright’s significance beyond his
writing the classic texts Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945),
staples of American cultural literacy in schools where censorship is not
tolerated. New directions point to Wright’s presence or absence in the
reorientations of the Barack Obama Era, which is especially marked by
post-racial claims that paradoxically co-exist with an increasing significance
of race.
It is noteworthy, for
example, that Mark Bracher’s “How to Teach for Social Justice: Lessons from Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and Cognitive Science”[iii]provides a remarkable footnote on the
philosophical and psychological qualities of Native Son which can
provoke “a recognition that entails, for all white readers, the further
recognition that we are ultimately responsible for all the Biggers (white and
black) and their horrific and brutal actions” (384). Perhaps Bracher
unintentionally reifies a black/white binary formation, forgetting that some of
the Biggers among us in the second decade of the 21stcentury are
Hispanic or Asian-Americans or as mixed-race as a Tiger Woods. In the context
of the Centennial, Bracher’s idea is a red flag. If Bigger Thomas and other
characters from Wright’s fictions are used as sociological icons without
rigorous qualifications, we risk intellectual impoverishment; we miss or
dismiss the importance of the salient points Wright made in the essay “How
‘Bigger’ Was Born” regarding the origins of fictions and the No Man’s Land
“which the common people of America never talk of but take for granted.”[iv] One of the more valuable lessons of
Centennial activities was how lack of skepticism about limits promotes
blindness rather than insight. For just such a reason, new directions entail
remembering.
David A. Taylor’s Soul
of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression American
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley& Sons, 2009) and Brian Dolinar’s “The Illinois
Writers’ Project Essays: Introduction,” Southern Quarterly46.2 (2009):
84-90 bid us to examine Wright’s use of ethnography more closely than did Carla
Cappetti’s book Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the
Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Rereading of Wright’s
1930s proletarian poems (only “Between the World and Me” seems to get notice
for its lynching theme) and stories (Uncle Tom’s Children) will beget
re-examination of Lawd Today! and the topic of spousal abuse and fresh
examination of domestic workers and organized labor in the unpublished novel Black
Hope (based in part on Wright’s extensive interviewing of domestic workers
in New York). James A. Miller’s excellent chapter “Richard Wright’s Scottsboro
of the Imagination” in Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous
Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) creates a fine
opportunity to investigate Wright’s perspectives on the American criminal legal
system in Native Son, Rite of Passage(1994), The Long Dream
(1958), and A Father’s Law (2008). Indeed, Wright’s importance in
critical discussions of race, law, and legal ethics has yet to be tapped. David
Taylor’s article “Literary Cubs, Canceling Out Each Other’s Reticence,” The
American Scholar (Summer 2009):136-141 provides new information regarding
Wright’s correspondence with Nelson Algren, and we should go to the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University) to discover more about
Wright’s correspondence with Joe C. Brown and others. Despite the biographical
attention that has been given to Wright by Constance Webb, Michel Fabre, John
A. Williams, Margaret Walker, Addison Gayle, and Hazel Rowley, much about the
full extent of Wright’s intelligence and analytic imagination has not been
engaged.
We should want to learn from the applications of
cutting-edge theory in W. Lawrence Hogue’s “Can the Subaltern Speak? A
Postcolonial, Existential Reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son,” The
Southern Quarterly 46.2 (2009): 9-39 and Mikko Tuhkanen’s “Queer Guerillas:
On Richard Wright’s and Frantz Fanon’s Dissembling Revolutionaries, MississippiQuarterly
61.4 (2008): 615-642. Both articles put Native Son and Black
Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and White Man,
Listen! (1957) in the present space of terrorism, suggesting which kinds of
international theory might enable contemporary readers to absorb and digest
Wright’s 20thcentury perspectives. Likewise, Richard Wright: New
Readings in the 21st Century (2011), edited by Alice
Mikal Craven and William E. Dow, contains fresh essays that bid us to consider
how the transnational qualities of Wright’s works might necessitate some use of
transcultural theory.
Wright’s uncanny intelligence and imagination, we should
remember, enabled him to warn us in The Color Curtain that
It is not difficult to imagine Moslems, Hindus,
Buddhists, and Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed with modern weapons,
to make the world safe for their mystical notions… (218)[v]
Ongoing re-examination of Wright’s works may yet reveal
other warnings that have been ignored.
“On ‘Third Consciousness’ in the Fiction of Richard
Wright,” The Black Scholar39.1-2 (2009): 40-45 is a welcomed Eastern
challenge from Professor Chen Xu (Hangzhou Dianzi University) to the adequacy
of W. E. B. DuBois’s thoroughly Western idea of double-consciousness. If we
embrace the probable effectiveness of “third consciousness” in marking a
certain uniqueness in African American literary traditions, we may better
understand the historical silence of double-consciousness (or playing in the
dark) in scholarly considerations of American literatures as multicultural. We
are enlightened by Howard Rambsy’s pioneering investigations of the visual
“packaging,” [“Re-presenting BlackBoy: The Evolving Packaging History of
Richard Wright’s Autobiography,” The Southern Quarterly 64.2
(2009): 71-83] for these investigations open vistas on the dynamics of motive
and power in marketplace politics used to manage African American literature as
well as on the dominance of visual popular culture. Our interest in Wright’s
use of the photograph is deepened by John Lowe’s sustained critique of Pagan
Spain,[vi][“The Transnational Vision of Richard
Wright’s Pagan Spain,” The Southern Quarterly 46.3 (2009)] just as Nancy
Dixon’s questioning of what Wright got wrong or right about Spanish culture in
“Did Richard Wright Get It Wrong?: A Spanish Look at Pagan Spain,” Mississippi
Quarterly 61.4 (2008): 581-591 reopens speculation about Wright’s readings
of African and Asian cultures. The examinations of Wright’s haiku by Toru
Kiuchi, Jianqing Zheng, Meta Schettler, Lee Gurga, and Richard Iadonisi in Valley
Voices: A Literary Review 8.2 (2008) and The Other World of Richard
Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), edited by Jianqin Zheng,
create yearning for fresh commentaries on Wright’s early poetry and the poetry
of his prose. We now have stronger reasons, by virtue of the testimonials
provided by Howard Rambsy, Tara Green, and Candice Love Jackson in Papers on
Language & Literature 44.4 (2008) and Mark Madigan and Toru Kiuchi in The
Black Scholar 39.1-2 (2009), for asking why and how we read or teach
Wright’s works, for testing the outcomes of using those works in efforts to
increase literacy (functional, visual, cultural, political, and rhetorical) in
postmodern, technology-dependent societies. literary study. My own anxiety
begins to be replaced by optimism when I wager that new directions in the study
of Richard Wright shall arm us for our battles with a future of globalization,
that they will help us balance the “rhetoric of carelessness” with a “rhetoric
of genuine concern.”
The scholarship, criticism, and theorizing that is
emerging call for remembering Wright’s optimism of the brilliant one-sentence
paragraph that ends the 1945 edition of Black Boy.
With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and
invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with
dignity, that the personalities of other should not be violated, that men
should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men
were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for
their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.
[i] A good starting point for answering
the question is the January 2001 issue of PMLA, which dealt with the
special topic: Globalizing Literary Studies.
[ii] Evelyn M. Simien and Ange-Marie Hancock,
“Mini-Symposium: Intersectionality Research.” Political Research Quarterly
64.1 (2011): 185.
[iv]Richard Wright,
“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Richard Wright: Early Works (New York: Library
of America, 1991), 871.
[v] Richard Wright. The Color
Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland, OH: The World
Publishing Company, 1956).
[vi] It is unfortunate that difficulties
in obtaining permission to reproduce Wright’s photographs for Pagan Spain
precluded their use to enhance Lowe’s remarkable commentary.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
1928 Gentilly Blvd.
New Orleans, LA
70119-2002
July 24, 2012
