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This part argues that Afro-modernist literature “pre-responded” to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications with growing bluntness and embellishment over the years from 1919 to 1972 and beyond. Thus, the fifth and last of the book's five theses, and the one that finally involves closer encounters with black poems, stories, essays, and novels than with their silhouettes in FBI files: Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature. Section 1 examines decisive responses to FBI surveillance in both the early journalism and the foundational poetry of the Harlem movement. Section 2 charts the FBI's migrant status in Afro-modernism from the mid-1930s through the early Cold War. Section 3 focuses on the expatriate trio of Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes, and their interlocking fictions of Paris noir in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Section 4 widens its focus, owing to the profusion of black Bureau writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final section sketches African American literature's less heated skirmish with the FBI after Hoover's death—a skirmish now led by black women including Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor.

Richard Wright’s journalism has been largely unexamined by Wright scholars. He has never been studied as a literary journalist and rarely placed in an African American tradition of journalism. William Dow’s chapter focuses on works that best reveal Wright as a heretofore unrecognized literary journalist: 12 Million Black Voices (1940) and a selection of his exile writings: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). It demonstrates the usefulness of literary journalistic forms to Wright as an African American writer and global humanitarian. This chapter also shows how Wright, while advancing his aesthetic aims, repurposed traditional journalism in order to promote a political solidarity with oppressed people around the world.

Richard Wright is an African American writer traditionally read within the American (and Western) literary realist framework. There is, though, a growing body of scholarship around his later haiku nature writing. Within this scholarship, scholars have theorized the ways in which his political thinking influenced his adaptation of the Japanese haiku form. Little of the scholarship, traditional or burgeoning, has focused on the ways in which the “nature thinking” present in his later haiku was already present throughout his early, middle, and late writing. But, what is more, little of the scholarship focuses on the ways in which his nature thinking was formative to the development of his “literary realism.” This chapter by James B. Haile III not only demonstrates the linkage between “nature thinking” and politics in his prose but also argues that Wright himself both participated in and was formative to the development of black nature writing in the United States.

This chapter by Laura Grattan offers an alternative to critics and admirers who equate Wright’s resistance to white supremacy and capitalism with either ressentiment or violence. Drawing on Native Son,Black Boy, and 12 Million Black Voices, the essay argues that Wright constructs a multifaceted politics of refusal that puts the regeneration of the body and its aesthetic senses at the center of struggles to create “new and strange way[s] of life.” Individual and collective transformation entails repertories of refusal that lessen attunement to an antiblack social order and that make possible generative practices necessary for freedom. The essay concludes by evaluating the creative potential of refusal in movements to abolish policing and prisons.

Cedric J. Robinson’s previously published essay discusses how Wright’s art expresses both the terrors and the possibilities of modern times. According to Robinson, Wright’s choices of literary forms enabled him to explore the complexities and subtleties of radical politics more authentically than conventional history, biography, or political-tract writing would allow. Through novels, Wright brought living consciousness into direct confrontation with social theory and ideology. Believing that Marxist ideology paternalistically remained for rather than of the (especially black) proletariat, Wright wanted to draw on existing folklore to express blacks’ deep and complex consciousness. Robinson argues that for the Communist Party USA to make good on its promise to serve as the greatest guarantee against fascism, it had to come more fully to terms with the appeal of fascism among the working class. Wright’s art tried to make sense of that troubling phenomenon.

Floyd W. Hayes III begins his chapter with the argument that apart from the figure of Aunt Sue in Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star,” Wright’s male-centered narratives often treated women characters as objects or props in male-ordered worlds, used to explain the protagonist’s situation rather than their own. Hayes argues that for Wright, black womanhood was marked by abjection. And, because black women suffered from deep, unsatiated hungers and prolonged experiences of impotence, they in turn participated in the stunting of black sons. Hayes concludes that Wright’s view of how alienation is expressed in and through misogyny and sexism and in relations with male characters who feel themselves homeless, limited his vision of black struggle.

This chapter analyzes the utopian fiction of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois. In response to a long-standing problem with emplacement, both authors use their fiction to manufacture idealized and ahistorical versions of colored empires. Hopkins creates an underground Ethiopian kingdom, while Du Bois uses the force of imagination to link India and the American South into a cohesive but still multiplicitous whole. Hopkins posits utopia not as a unidirectional process of development but a resurrection of an earlier order, while Du Bois strategically employs romance to overcome the limitations of a pragmatic politics of compromise. Their romantic utopianism both responds to Booker T. Washington’s uplift ideology and also participates in a larger philosophy of internationalism emerging in response to colonial rule.

Bigger Thomas, one of Richard Wright’s most memorable and distinctive fictional creations, has been interpreted in vastly different ways. This is partly because readers bring to Native Son different sets of beliefs about US capitalism, about the psychology of US racism, about the spiritual resources of black communities, and about the commitments and priorities of the United States government. This chapter, by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, compares how Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright interpreted Bigger’s story. The comparison reminds us of the variety of political projects to which the story can be put to use, and the possible futures for the United States—from working-class fascism, to state-led progressivism, to black communalism, to interracial fantasies and nightmares—that Bigger’s tale can illuminate.

Kevin Kelly Gaines’s reprinted essay on Wright’s Black Power reminds readers that Wright rejected the myth of a transhistorical, transnational black cultural unity. On this point, Wright’s thinking converged with that of other black Marxist intellectuals in exile, including Padmore and James. Wright instead proposed a form of pan-Africanism founded on a shared history of oppression and a critical, dialectical consciousness of the situation of blacks in the West. The latter would have to give pride of place to the emergent political consciousness of African people, even if some of its elements would be radically foreign to New World black people. Bridging the historical differences would not prove impossible, however. After all, as Gaines observes, by the time Wright’s first daughter, Julia, reached adulthood, she had joined the black expatriate community in Ghana. It had supplanted Paris for intellectuals and artists seeking to join a black-led struggle informed by global ideals of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

Jane Anna Gordon argues that Wright, while stressing the economic legacies of racialized enslavement, also explored three features of slavery that have persisted since its formal abolition: (1) the absence of a relationship between that for which enslaved people were responsible and that for which they were punished; (2) a legacy of “two races locked in daily combat”; and (3) the treatment of black people as if they had no kin. According to Wright, even though nonblack descendants of slaves have arguably become free of the histories of their ancestors, such freedom remains elusive for African-descended communities. For most black people, “postslavery” has been a protracted racialized neoslavery. Widespread public embarrassment regarding slavery’s continued grammar has not been matched by commitment to its actual eradication. Consequently, even though Wright himself was able to steal himself away from US unfreedom, this fell short of his normative ideal of freedom.

The chapter explores how Richard Wright, the great American author and black radical, in his concern with the dynamics of European decolonisation, envisaged the effects of the end of British rule overseas. This brings to light some of the connections between British decolonisation and US Civil Rights. In order to do this I explain the centrality of black Paris to the making of Wright, and the influence of a generation of Caribbean intellectuals on his life, literature and politics. The chapter closes with a discussion of Wright’s reading of Nkrumah’s Gold Coast Revolution. This story highlights the transnational nature of decolonisation, as well as its intersections with Cold War politics.

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first tells us how generations of black writers benefited from Richard Nathaniel Wright directly and from the Federal Writers' Project, constituted in 1935, indirectly. The chapter provides a glimpse of how Wright “bridged” the division between his inner and exterior worlds, and how he expressed that there is a need to confront the self to break free from the limitations and move forward and achieve liberation. And finally the chapter draws parallels and similarities between Youngblood's life and that of Wright's in becoming a writer, even if it would have been far easier for Youngblood to be established as one considering she belonged to a much later time.

Tommy J. Curry considers Wright’s views on gender in terms of the historical reality of black males’ vulnerability to sexual violence at the hands of white men and white women. Curry explores Wright’s impassioned response to the 1951 trial and execution of fellow Mississippi native Willie McGee. McGee had been charged with having raped a white woman, Williametta Hawkins, who had been described as his mistress but who, in fact, had threatened to cry rape if he refused her advances. Curry reports that at that time, black men, often out of economic need, were sometimes coerced into sexual intercourse by threats of false accusations of rape. Otherwise, they would be either literally or metaphorically lynched. In a way unprecedented in Wright scholarship, Curry frames Wright’s “The Man of All Work” as an allegory for the rape of McGee. In the story, a black man cross-dresses in search of employment in domestic work. This leads to a series of misunderstandings and misidentifications by whites that almost kill him. Curry concludes that this story was far more than a clever plot: it effectively expressed a particular set of humiliations and dilemmas faced by black men.

This excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic offers a different perspective on Wright’s thinking regarding relations between black men and women, and about the ability of black communities more generally to offer liberating narratives of racial authenticity. Gilroy suggests that one legacy of the racially coercive Jim Crow South was domestic authoritarianism, as well as violence in public and intimate relations. Wright recognized this and openly addressed it in his art. According to Gilroy, Wright manifested a protofeminism in his early work and later seemed to recognize the place of black women in racial struggle. At the same time, Wright thought that the stresses of modern black life meant that racial identity, on its own, could not guarantee racial solidarity or even fraternal association. This was evident in Wright’s portraits of black homophobia, misogyny and other antisocial attributes that could not be ascribed solely to racism. This frankness, Gilroy worries, is misunderstood by those who would read him in a narrowly US black context rather than alongside his diverse interlocutors on both sides of the Atlantic.

This chapter focuses on three African American writers of the Depression generation: Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. Their respective Communist autobiographies—The Lonely Crusade (1947), Invisible Man (1952), and The Outsider (1953)—depicting Black men repudiating the Party as an organization and defying the boundaries of Communist propriety, contributed to the postwar renovation of the Black protest tradition.

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.

Building on his previous analysis of the short stories in Wright’s anthology Uncle Tom’s Children, Abdul R. JanMohamed reflects on Wright’s gradual discovery of a close relationship between social death, actual death, and symbolic death. Because “primitive accumulation” refers not only to the material dispossession of the slave’s world but also to the appropriation of subjectivity, questions arise about whether an ex-slave can repossess psycho-political and sociopolitical components of subjectivity in Jim Crow societies that operate predominantly through the inculcation of widespread fear. Against the poststructuralist doxa about the decentered subject and the need to abolish “identity politics,” JanMohamed insists that individual subjects are driven to center themselves and to make their lives as coherent as possible. This is especially true in contexts of colonization, racialization, genderization, and enslavement that rely on disrupting the attempts by oppressed people to control their daily practices.

This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial and biological “purity” that was so violently affirmed in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South. Framing this chapter with African-American writer Richard Wright’s experience in what he describes as Franco’s “pagan” Spain, I examine how Spain and the South provide specific examples where racial indeterminacy compels the subject to embrace performativity as a means of shirking the expectations of “race” and “biology” thrust upon them by those perceived as “pure.”

This chapter explores Wright’s involvement in Communism and Marxism. Born in Jim Crow Mississippi in 1908 during the time of the Great Migration, Wright and his family settled in Chicago where he learned the tenets of Marxism and joined the Communist Party (CP) in 1932. During those years, he began to incorporate new theories of modern human social structures and culture being developed by the famed Chicago School of sociology, in particular the work of Robert Ezra Park and Louis Wirth. The remainder of the chapter highlights Wright’s efforts to establish an institutional structure that aims to transform the way Americans discussed and approached relations between white and black people, both “inter-personally” and collectively.

The introduction outlines major periods in Richard Wright’s intellectual life, emphasizing the similarities between the historical moment in which he wrote and the post-Obama period in which this text is being published. It also explains the thematic organization of the text into five sections focused, respectively, on radical politics, sexuality and gender, black internationalism, the range of genres in which Wright wrote, and on using Wright’s ideas to address contemporary black political struggles. Running through the text is an exploration of how Wright thought one could build more inclusive forms of solidarity across gender and national lines through careful attention to the distinct but related expressions of capitalist and imperialist exploitation. For Wright, the starting point was always the life worlds of the black masses whose liberation it was the task of the black writer to advance.