Straightjacketed Into the Future: Richard Wright and the Ambiguities of Decolonization (Critical Essay)

RICHARD WRIGHT'S definitive move to Paris in the spring of 1947 marked the end of a five-year period that his biographer, Michel Fabre, characterized as "a second maturation" and "reorientation" in the writer's intellectual development. (1) The change of scene was crucial for overcoming disillusionment with the Communist Party and America in general, which both seemed indifferent to the issue of African-American freedom. In the French capital, as well as in London, Wright had the opportunity to meet black intellectuals active in national and transnational liberation movements, contacts that rekindled his hopes and optimism toward the fate of oppressed black populations, in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. Wright was present at the caf6 Brasserie Lipp in October 1946, when the first board meeting of Presence Africaine, the magazine which would become the voice of the Negritude movement, was held. In the following years he participated in the activity of the publication, contributing stories and raising funds through his contacts at UNESCO. (2) Wright, however, was more in tune with the English-speaking black intellectuals based in London, and became particularly close to Trinidadian-born George Padmore, with whom he shared the notion that political freedom for colonial states could be achieved only with modernization and strong economic development.