“I was looking at myself”: Richard Wright’s Return to West Africa

press release: In summer of 1953, Richard Wright traveled to the Gold Coast for a couple of months to report on its bid for independence from Britain. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, one of the author’s first forays into surging anticolonial struggles, was not well received by postcolonial critics. Many contended that Wright’s curiosity to see if any of him is still in Africa combined with his lack of knowledge about the continent hindered his ability to connect with Ghanaians and make their voices heard.

Against charges that Wright’s diasporic connection only marshals a rhetoric of distance and difference, I argue that his return as “the long lost son of Africa,” is mediated by another metaphoric return to his Southern roots and its enduring legacies of slavery, one that also produces solidarity amongst the “Wretched of the Earth.” This other implicit return sheds new light on Wright’s vision of Ghana, particularly his controversial treatment of poverty and race politics.  

Please register in advance here (Zoom).

Laila Amine is Associate Professor of Global Black Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centers on the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality in post-World War II narratives of migration, including African Americans in Europe and Africa and African immigrants in Europe and the United States. She is the author of Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), as well as articles on Black Europe for journals such as American Literature, and Culture, Theory, and Critique. She is currently at work on book project about African American writers in Europe, provisionally titled Of Cosmopolitans, Exiles, and Refugees. This project was supported by an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Ford Foundation fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and a fellowship at the Institute for Research for the Humanities at UW-Madison. Related publications are forthcoming in African American Review in 2022, the Critical Concept Series on Diaspora and Literary Study published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, and the Oxford Handbook of African American Women’s Writing in 2023.