SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “‘Last Call to the West’: Richard Wright's The Color Curtain.” In South Atlantic Review 59, no. 4 (November 1994): 77-88.

As the record of Richard Wright's travel to Indonesia in 1955 to attend the Bandung Conference of African and Asian nations, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956) reveals Richard Wright's effort to understand his own identity in relation to non-Western cultures. In his capacity as a free-lance observer rather than delegate, Wright was perhaps more independent ideologically than others, although his indirect State Department funding (through the Congress for Cultural Freedom) without Wright's knowledge “was actually financed in part by the CIA” (Cobb 233). Without overestimating Wright's understanding of his non-Western subject (James Baldwin charges: “[Wright's] notions of society, politics, and history … seemed to me utterly fanciful” [148]), I hope to establish that The Color Curtain, in addition to telling much about Wright's independence as a thinker and his autobiographical predilections, says much that is still worth considering about the relationship of the West to the non-Western world. As Michel Fabre writes after considering Wright's relationship to America and to the non-Western world, “[Y]ou have probably noticed how modern his attitude is and how relevant to our present concerns with freedom, the cultural revolution, and the making of a world civilization” (139). In contrast to the personal isolation that James Baldwin theorizes in his essay “More Notes of a Native Son”—a critique of Wright's individualistic personality as well as of his limitations as a political theorist—Wright's impulse in The Color Curtain, in Black Power, and perhaps in Pagan Spain and The Outsider as well, is toward a broadening of community and a search for cultural connection.

Most significant, perhaps, is the fact that Wright did come to Bandung—on an arduous flight to Indonesia from Madrid, via Rome, Cairo, Baghdad, Calcutta, and Bangkok—a journey that in itself is evidence of this impulse. It may well be that Wright's decision to travel to Africa in 1953 and to Indonesia in 1955 was related to his repressed hope of finding a satisfying “connection” with humanity, a desire for shared closeness despite what others read as his air of defensive superiority. Wright's very decision to undertake the arduous plane trip to Jakarta and to attend the Bandung Conference implied an interest in the psychological identification with the largest possible groups—to counter the anxiety that Russell Brignano terms his “disquietude about his own figurative survival” (103) as one who, at least in his literary education, felt himself to be the “product” of Western civilization. The ambivalence of Wright's position at the Bandung Conference as a person of color who was also an American, with all that America's world position in the 1950s implied, is figured into his own record of the trip and into his stance as an independent and somewhat reserved observer. Nonetheless, the essential conclusion to be drawn from The Color Curtain is that Wright, envisaging a non-Western cultural and political course distinct from Western as well as from Communist models, is searching for identity beyond himself and his own cultural limitations. The crucial truth is that, even as Wright often parroted assumptions of Western scientific superiority, he identified with the colonized peoples who had been the victims of this technology. His attitude toward African and Asian cultures often reflected the deepest divisions in his own psyche, based on his bitter struggle to achieve his own position in a Western society. It is no wonder that he was drawn to Africa and Asia, for through their colonized histories Wright was conducting an exploration of his own most profound psychological divisions. Wright's psychological ambivalence, however, should be read not merely as the private turmoil of a complex intellectual but also, and more significantly, as reflections of a more generally experienced consequence of postcolonialism. All of Wright's “private” ambivalence—over Western technological dominance, over secularism versus religious fundamentalism, over the destructiveness of colonialism toward indigenous cultures—keenly reflect his enormous sensitivity to the major human problems traced to the devastating effects of colonialism.

As Jack B. Moore notes, Wright was by temperament “a prickly thinker who seemed to go out of his way to express his feelings and ideas even when these were not popular” (“Black Power Revisited” 162). In The Color Curtain Wright records the background of the Bandung Conference and dutifully notes its major speakers, but his interest centers on what one might term the novelistic, on the agency of character and psychology, rather than on the political forum. Clearly Wright is impressed by the collective aspects of the conference: the gathering of leaders from twenty-nine nations, a “conglomeration of the world's underdogs” (CC [The Color Curtain] 135) representing over a billion people, which Wright describes as “the human race speaking.” His emphasis on masses and on the gathering of different cultures (“every religion under the sun”), creates ambivalent possibilities either for apocalyptic conflict or unprecedented unity. As he had in Black Power, in The Color Curtain Wright recognizes that the social environment under colonialism had created structures of dependence that were not easily removed in newly independent countries. “There is a nervous kind of dependence bred by imperialism,” he wrote of neocolonial paternalism (CC 112). As Cobb notes, “According to Wright, the greatest crime that took place under the aegis of imperialism was not economic exploitation, but the creation of a servile personality structure in the native population” (231).

The neocolonial ambitions of leaders such as Chinese premier Chou En-lai threatened the independence of other newly independent peoples. Wright also foresaw the danger of civil anarchy and unrest represented by “millions of restless and demanding people” with unrealistic expectations brought about by the newly achieved freedom of Asian and African nations. Wright predicted the unleashing of old hatreds and ethnic divisions, and he believed in the West's obligation to “interfere”: “civilization itself is built upon the right to interfere” (CC 211). As the proclaimed champion of human freedom and secular, scientific culture, America should “educate people in how to build a nation” (CC 212). The positive value of the West lay in its “secular outlook grounded in the disciplines of science” and industrial knowledge (CC 218). In his controversial paper “Tradition and Industrialization” presented at the first world conference of black writers, meeting in September 1956 in Paris, Wright announced that his “position is a split one,” that is, Western and black. For Wright, Western political thought was the source for important ideals of political freedom, justice, and equality, but as an African American of his generation he also felt deeply alienated from Western institutions.

Because his political thought was based on his own ideals and not on any systematic knowledge of pragmatic politics, Wright has been criticized for his political naiveté, and indeed he seems to have been unaware of or simply uninterested in the subtle behind-the-scenes maneuvering at Bandung. For example, Wright interpreted Nehru's abstention from the opening remarks as a sign of his “neutrality,” a wise strategy of the “great man.” According to Carlos Romulo, the pro-Western representative from the Philippines, Nehru in fact abstained because of his anger at being outvoted after he had adamantly opposed permitting opening statements by all nations. Chou En-lai's stance of compromise, which Wright interpreted as a shrewd gesture of “good will,” should be attributed, according to Romulo, to his lacking the diplomatic skill to steer the meeting his own way (14). Chou's “conciliatory posture,” noted by George Kahin, was also apparently a deliberate attempt to defuse the mounting tension between mainland China and the United States over Taiwan. Certainly Chou did not support the statement in the conference's final communiqué “that the cultures of Asia and Africa rest on spiritual foundations.” Nor could Chou have been pleased with the communiqué decision to oppose “all forms of colonialism” (Romulo 15), including implicitly Communist expansion in eastern Europe and Asia. Only in so far as Chou was able to use the issue of nuclear arms control was he successful diplomatically, according to Romulo.

Wright was unaware of or simply not interested in the diplomatic subtleties of negotiation underlying the final communiqué. While many representatives privately expressed their bitter memories of colonial domination, the focus of public statements was the necessity of economic cooperation. The final communiqué stresses, as its first point, the need for economic cooperation with the West based on the employment of foreign capital, stabilization of commodity trade, elimination of mercantilist practices, and the like. A section on the problems of dependent people does appear in the communiqué, but it is focused narrowly on the struggle of French colonies in North Africa. The material superiority and arrogance of America, coupled with its unequal foreign aid for Africa and Asia relative to Europe and its assumption that American-style democracy was right for Asia, were other points of criticism. As a consequence of his disinterest in politics per se, the essentially individualistic gestures that Wright saw as the focus of the conference—its “call to the West” and the role of the “Westernized Asian” in its deliberations—correspond little with what political scientists have stressed. According to Kahin, the difficult work of the conference was “defining the kind of colonialism the Conference was to condemn or the principles it would recommend for promotion of peace” (30), especially “the principle that freedom and peace are interdependent” (31). The results of the conference, Kahin notes, included the expression of a new Asian “dignity” and independence vis-à-vis the West; Chou En-lai's participation also promoted China's break with the Soviet Union by expanding its ties with the rest of Asia. Looking back from 1965, the Indonesian Executive Command saw the significance of Bandung as strengthening nationalist movements in Africa and Asia, encouraging governmental cooperation among African and Asian states, and promoting nongovernmental cooperation, as in the 1958 African-Asian Writers' Conference that “urged all African-Asian writers to develop national literature” and to spurn “modern civilization” for its own sake (Revolutionary Flame 31).

Thus, from the perspective of many political observers, Wright's report on the Bandung Conference might well be termed subjective or idiosyncratic. If Moore's statement that “Wright sometimes creates his own Africa” in Black Power is accurate (“Black Power Revisited” 185), is the same true for his “creation” of Asia in The Color Curtain? Did Wright assume too readily that, as an African American, he could identify with the African and Asian peoples represented at Bandung? As Robert Felgar notes, such is the “essential Wrightian theme” that appears in White Man, Listen! (1957) and other books: “[Wright] had an obsession for seeing that the position of blacks in the Deep South is only the situation of all the dark races, of all the oppressed, on a global scale” (150). Wright may also have felt that his association with African writers and his earlier visit to the Gold Coast, out of which he published Black Power, had prepared him for Bandung. Certainly he had long shared a friendship with the Afro-Caribbean writer George Padmore (who had arranged his visit to the Gold Coast in 1953), with C. L. R. James, and with other Pan-Africanists living in London. His reading of the writings of Franz Fanon offered some theoretical framework for his understanding. After 1948, with his move to Paris, he was associated with the influential journal Presénce Africaine and developed friendships with French-speaking adherents of negritude and black power, including Alionne Diop, Aimé Cesaire, and Leopold Senghor. In a general sense, at least, Wright's background did in fact prepare him for the issues of class, race, religion, and colonialism underlying the conference. Certainly Wright had experienced poverty and racial oppression; he had also suffered from an intensely fundamentalist religious upbringing, and he understood from personal experience the economic and cultural restrictions of colonialism.

The sympathies that Wright brought to Bandung had been formed very early in his life. Margaret Walker goes so far as to single out Wright's early experiences in the South as the primary determinants of his personality. As Walker writes: “He reflects almost in totality the mirror image of racism in the South as it is seen in both black and white men” (181). As elsewhere in his writing, Wright both analyzes and reacts passionately to the racial issues he encounters at Bandung. Whether he suffered from a “flawed personality” as a result of “the psychic wound of racism” (Walker 295) is a question of interpretation; certainly, he struggled with and against his psychological ambivalence all his life. In both Black Power and The Color Curtain Wright in fact assumes a close analogy between his Southern experience and the colonial experience of Africa and Asia. In certain passages of Black Power it is difficult to determine whether he is writing about Africa or the American South, for Wright's views on Africa and Asia as well are often reminiscent of what he wrote concerning African American experience in 12 Million Black Voices (1941), where in his foreword he stressed the movement toward urbanization of twentieth-century African Americans. Socially conditioned by “what we see before our eyes each day,” African Americans inevitably become westernized (12 Million 48) yet they have at the same time “never been allowed to be a part of western, industrial civilization” (127).

The psychological alienation resulting from colonization is shared by Wright and by many Bandung representatives of formerly colonized peoples. Following the African diaspora, Wright states, American life is “the only life we remember or have ever known” (12 Million 146), yet tragically Wright himself felt alienated from both Africa and European America. As he wrote in Black Boy: “In all my life—though surrounded by many people—I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being” (Later Works 249). He wrote in The Outsider (projecting his autobiographical feelings into the character of Damon Cross) that “he needed these people and could become human only with them” (Later Works 509). The intensity of Wright's desire to establish connection with others—and its relationship to Wright's situation as an African American living in exile—is underlined in The Outsider when he analyzes Cross: “What really obsessed him was his nonidentity which negated his ability to relate himself to others” (Later Works 525).

Because of his own sensitivity as an outsider to much of postwar African American culture and to American culture in general, Wright fixes on an apparently minor aspect of the Bandung Conference: the “westernized Asian” also alienated from his own culture. It should be no surprise, given the consistent focus on such a character throughout his fiction and travel writing, that a major theme of The Color Curtain becomes the plight of the alienated intellectual, separated from his traditional roots but not accepted by modern Western culture. One example of the westernized Asian is the educated Indonesian whom Wright meets and who feels “that Western contact has had an emancipating effect upon him and his people, smashing the irrational ties of custom and tradition” (CC 47). Wright notes the constant self-consciousness of the cultural hybrid who, like Wright himself (a life-long sufferer from gastrointestinal disorders and associated ailments) experiences chronic anxiety resulting from cultural insecurity. Wright finds that “the classical conception of the East is dead even for the Easterner” (CC 70) and that “the Asian elite was, in many ways, more Western than the West” (CC 71), yet cultural leadership has passed from the West to a future that non-Western culture will shape. Without considering the possibilities for new forms of exploitation, Wright predicts that cheap non-Western labor will break Western economic power.

In his consideration of the economic potential of formerly colonized nations, Wright showed a great deal more perception and independence than did the Western journalistic media, yet he shared the fear of “racism in reverse” expressed in the Western press. The pervasive sense in the American and European press was that the Bandung Conference, at which whites were excluded, was a “planning stage” for an African-Asian “combination” impelled by bitterness toward the West, a perspective that is also reflected in contemporary reviews of The Color Curtain (see Reilly 273-85). As Wright notes: “Everyone read into it his own fears” (CC 93). The very numbers that arouse Wright's interest also contain the potential for a misuse of power. When Wright receives his press card ahead of a white journalist, he experiences the disturbing power of racism: “[I]t was simply a question of color, which was an easy way of telling friend from foe” (CC 114). Interestingly, the official representatives at Bandung did not stress their numbers in the same way that Wright and the Western press did. Rather, as Carlos Romulo stated in the conclusion of his opening speech at the conference (from which he quotes in his 1956 book), “Our strength flows not out of our number though the numbers we represent are great. It flows out of our perception of history and out of vital purpose for tomorrow” (58).

What Wright most feared was not the newfound power of the formerly colonized nations—a changing order that he accepted and celebrated—but the potential misuse of power through an irrational combination of ethnic and religious emotionalism. In the postcolonial world Wright observed that “a racial consciousness, evoked by the attitudes and practices of the West, had slowly blended with a defensive religious feeling: here, in Bandung, the two had combined into one: a racial and religious system of identification manifesting itself in emotional nationalism which was now leaping state boundaries and melting and merging, one into the other” (CC 140; Wright's emphasis). In Black Power and in The Color Curtain he “demonstrate[s] his suspicions of political leaders whose control of the masses seemed based on religious fervor and mysterious impulses” (Moore, “Dream of Africa” 235).

The characterization of passionate religion as non-Western indicates that Wright believed that in his own fundamentalist upbringing he had been victimized by the proselytizing force of Christianity. As Cobb points out, Wright applied the same lesson to non-Westerners dominated by custom and mysticism that he had drawn from his own rebellion: “The rural, religious milieu that he rejected spelled poverty and degradation” (238), and only secular humanism could secure progress. Margaret Walker notes that Wright “was adamant against all religious faiths,” including African religion (231). Felgar may be correct in noticing that Wright saw that Moslems “could use their strict, life-pervading religion to help themselves” (145), but Islam was especially troubling to Wright, in part because of his close personal associations with Jewish radicals in Chicago, and in part owing to his marriage to a Jewish woman. In Moslem belief he saw “the firm rejection by the Asian mind of a division between the secular and the sacred” (Felgar 124). Wright's distaste for all forms of religious passion is captured in his scornful characterization of “the men of the East” as “religious animals” (CC 80).

It is curious, given his friendship with a number of African writers and his interest in African and Asian culture, including the cultures of Japan and China, that Wright should be so often seen as wanting to impose Western culture on non-Western societies. Yet the interpretation that Wright believed “the culturally subjugated country's vacuum can be filled in some way by such Western values as individualism, rationality, technology, science” (Felgar 143) can certainly be supported by passages in Wright's writing, if not by his work as a whole. Felgar states the “paradox” in Wright's attitude toward Africa: “[T]hey should throw the West out and then become as Western as possible” (Felgar 155). The irrevocable “triumph” of Western over Pakistani culture (CC 70; qtd. in Felgar 143) is representative of Wright's view of the lack of cultural vitality in Africa and Asia, at least outside of India, China, and Japan. In Black Power, to cite another example, Wright repeats a common misconception that the products of material culture cannot survive long in the hot, humid climate of West Africa. Combined with the effects of five hundred years of colonialism, much of Africa and Asia were, in Wright's opinion, left without a vital indigenous culture. The same traumatizing process had, in Wright's view, affected African Americans, so that in Native Son, despite Bigger's relationships to family and to a few others, “Wright intended [him] to be a man without a culture” (Ochshorn 387).

Despite Wright's belief that the process of colonization has destroyed much of non-Western culture, it is not accurate to say that he believed that Western culture could, or should, fill the vacuum left by this destruction. Wright obviously admired many aspects of Western culture, particularly its technological prowess and its tradition of secular humanism. Nonetheless, he recognized the need for self-determination as the first requirement of developing countries, and he looked toward a future in which Africa and Asia would take the lead in economic and political terms. Given Wright's tendency toward dramatic generalizations, it is difficult to achieve a balanced and fair view of his writing in relationship to the developing world. First of all, Wright's psychology was itself that of a complicated genius projecting into the minds of characters his own inner divisions and of entire cultures. His most vivid responses to Bandung were to human feelings rather than to political arguments. (One should note that he imagines a world “without ideology” in ideal terms, as he says that “maybe ideology was a weapon that suited only certain hostile conditions of life” [CC 176].) Wright was rarely inaccurate in capturing the human motives and fears of the characters he created, but these created personae could hardly correspond to the objective observations of less creative observers. Furthermore, Wright did not have the advantage of recent cultural studies discrediting Western hegemony; he wrote at the very moment in history when Western power and wealth, especially American power and wealth, appeared most imposing.

Perhaps, however, even given his limitations, Wright saw more clearly than many of his contemporary critics. He may have intuitively understood that cultural nationalism of the kind that romanticizes the past simply promotes further colonial domination. As Wimal Dissanayake writes, Wright prodded non-Westerners “to scrutinize and reject those aspects of their culture and personality which conformed to the terms defined by the regnant discourse and thereby pave the way for the assertion of their own identity” (484). Wright did not accept the simplistic notion that modernization was inimical to non-Western cultural identity. Industrialization, in Wright's view, presented formerly colonized nations with an opportunity for creative endeavor that would be meaningful in a modern context and would thereby help those peoples regain belief in themselves (Dissanayake 486).

Wright's analysis is perhaps even more controversial today than when he published his conclusions in Black Power and The Color Curtain, for Wright clearly had little patience with the kind of interest in mystical and irrational forces that is now asserted as an alternative to Western linear thinking. Clyde Taylor effectively summarizes a certain direction in non-Western writing toward a “transrational consciousness” with emphasis on oral culture, ritual, sacred symbology, nonlinear organization of time and space, and magic (795). This conception of the non-Western, which Taylor traces in recent post-colonial fiction and which John Edgar Wideman invokes in speaking of “a powerful, indigenous vernacular tradition” in African American culture (vii), is certainly very far from the future Wright envisaged.

To the extent that he does feel hopeful, Wright places his faith in the interrelationship of cultures. The West must learn from and respect non-Western cultures, but Africa and Asia may also learn from the West. Wright's appreciation for American technology and comfort, noted by Margaret Walker (209), reflected his lifelong regard for the value of science and technology, as well as his personal discomfort with disorder and squalor of any sort, yet one should not dismiss the sincerity or extent of Wright's interest in non-Western societies. The future, as Wright envisages it, involves a new leadership on the part of African, Asian, and African American cultures. Admittedly Wright's knowledge of these cultures, even (as Baldwin charges) of postwar African American society, was at times superficial and his pronouncements tactless, yet his fundamental vision of the relationship of Western and non-Western cultures should not be dismissed out of hand.

Indeed, Wright's very first publication, a poem appearing in Left Front, had, in his own words, “linked white life with black, merged two streams of common experience,” and he had discovered his ambition, to “make these lives merge with the lives of the mass of mankind” (Later Works 303, 316). The effort to find a common humanity, to “bind men together in a common unity” (CC 24), reflects Wright's overriding fear of a primal violence that he sees rooted in racism and religious passion. In literary terms, Wright promotes a “broadening” of postcolonial writing toward “the common themes and burdens of literary expression which are the heritage of all men” (White Man, Listen! qtd. in Brignano 111). As Margaret Walker noted perceptively, “Mind and body he wandered over the earth seeking always a common ground of humanity” (212). She sees Wright's dream as moderate, not radical; it is “to have an ordered, rational world in which we all can share” (202).

Underlining his plea with capitalization, Wright characterizes Bandung as “THE LAST CALL OF WESTERNIZED ASIANS TO THE MORAL CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST!” (CC 202). A “de-Occidentalized world” in which non-Western societies will develop autonomously need not reject the humanistic political tradition of human dignity and individual freedom that Wright valued so highly. It is significant that Wright's last public speech, delivered on 8 November 1960 at the American Church in Paris, dealt with the policies of the West toward developing nations. To the very end of his life, Wright carried his dream of a world governed by ideals of reason and individual dignity in which all cultures would contribute and from which all would benefit. Standing almost alone against the reigning climate of bitterness and global distrust in which he lived, Wright continued to uphold those values of reason, progress, and humanity he believed could be shared by all cultures.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dell, 1963.

Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1970.

Cobb, Nina Kressner. “Richard Wright and the Third World.” Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: Hall, 1982. 228-39.

Dissanayake, Wimal. “Richard Wright: A View from the Third World.” Callaloo 9.3 (1986): 481-91.

Fabre, Michel. “Wright's Exile.” Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Ed. David Ray and Robert T. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1973. 121-39.

Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Hall, 1980.

Kahin, George. The Asian-African Conference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1956.

Moore, Jack B. “Black Power Revisited: In Search of Richard Wright.” Mississippi Quarterly 41 (1988): 161-86.

———. “Richard Wright's Dream of Africa.” Journal of African Studies 2 (1975): 231-46.

Ochshorn, Kathleen. “The Community of Native Son.” Mississippi Quarterly 42 (1989): 387-92.

Reilly, John M., ed. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Franklin, 1978.

The Revolutionary Flame of Bandung. Jakarta: The Executive Command, n.d.

Romulo, Carlos. The Meaning of Bandung. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1956.

Taylor, Clyde. “Black Writing as Immanent Humanism.” Southern Review 21 (1985): 790-99.

Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man; A Critical Look at His Work. New York: Warner, 1988.

Wideman, John Edgar. Preface. Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. Ed. Terry McMillan. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Wright, Richard. Black Power. New York: Harper, 1954.

———. Later Works. New York: Library of America, 1991.

———. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland: World, 1956.

———. Pagan Spain. 1956. London: Bodley Head, 1960.

———. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. New York: Arno, 1969.