On Richard Wright

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, January 27 at 7pm for a conversation on Richard Wright between Kazembe Balagun, Executive Director of Maysles Documentary Center, and John Bohn, author of “Narrating Self-Abolition: On Richard Wright,” published in e-flux Journal issue #158.

Despite his importance to US literature and social movement history, Richard Wright (1908–1960) has received little public attention in the era of Black Lives Matter compared to his importance among writers, artists, and activists involved in the revolutionary struggles of the 1930s and 1960s. Wright was the first best-selling Black author in the United States and an influential organizer of Black literature, mentoring and championing writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and George Lamming early in their careers. He was also a lifelong radical whose engagement with communism, Black liberation, and the anti-colonial struggle made him a target of the FBI and State Department. His most well-known novel, Native Son(1940), has, at turns, inspired readers by its honest depiction of Black rage against white supremacy, and confounded them with a seemingly pessimistic story of a blundered attempt at interracial unity.

In “Narrating Self-Abolition: On Richard Wright,” Bohn argues that Wright deserves reconsideration in the current moment. What first appears as pessimism in Wright’s work can also be understood as hard-won, revolutionary hope. Such hope, cultivated in struggle but unapologetically aware of the violence to which it responds, may be uniquely suited to confront today’s conditions, as the rise of fascist movements around the globe meet a determined yet so far limited resistance. Wright had no illusions about the difficulties of revolutionary struggle. It involves not only a collective abolition of the institutions of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism, but an abolition of the individual self shaped by those institutions as well—a theme he explored in Native Son.

Balagun and Bohn take the publication of Bohn’s essay as an occasion to, in the spirit of the blues, trade twelves on Richard Wright and the topics that his life and works inspire: the role of writers and artists in social movements; Baldwin’s critique of Native Son and Wright’s changing reception over time; Wright’s friendship with Frantz Fanon and his impact on third world literature and anti-colonial struggle; and the challenges around narrating racialized and gendered antagonisms and their overcoming.

For more information, contact [email protected].

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