Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana

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.