Richard Wright, The Outsider and the Empire of Liberal Pluralism: Race and American Expansion After World War Ii (Critical Essay)

RICHARD WRIGHT'S The Outsider has most often been read in respect to its deep engagement--and for some critics over-engagement--with European philosophy in general and French existentialism in particular. (1) While these readings have been extremely rich and varied, in this essay I resituate Wright's deeply philosophical novel within and against a different and neglected historical and theoretical context: namely that of the Cold War--or more specifically, Cold War racial liberalism and its connections to the consolidation of U.S. empire in the years during and after World War II. Reconsidering The Outsider in this context allows us to read the novel as an important contribution to the global politics of race in the period, one that challenged liberal representations linking a quintessentially "American" story of domestic racial progress to a larger, unbroken narrative of American expansion. On a broader level, I also hope with this reassessment of Wright's novel to contribute to recent scholarly efforts to recover some of the vital African American political and social traditions suppressed by the Cold War, and place them back into conversation with contemporary political and social efforts to imagine worldly and expansive visions that stretch the national boundaries of U.S. liberalism in general and U.S. racial liberalism in particular. (2) The Empire of American Pluralism