Richard Wright

""From the back cover:

This volume presents the collected research papers of Richard Wright, drawing them together from the various journals in which they were originally published between 1974 and 2003 into a newly set version. The articles have been standardised, replacing the differing formats of those appearing in the Numismatic Chronicle, the Numismatic Circular, and rescuing the rest from the relative obscurity of the more difficult to find publications in which some of them appeared. To the thirty seven articles is added another published here for the first time. Four appendices draw together additional material, and a fifth publishes Richard's last revision of his article on the British medals commemorating the Keying Junk, a maritime marvel of the 1840s.

Richard's achievement in these articles, and now in this volume, is a remarkable example of the quality of numismatic research contributed by collectors. He follows the long tradition of the practice of collecting, developing it into a curiosity no longer satisfied by the available reference work. Building on the work of Kalgan Shih, Eduard Kann and Tracey Woodward, all like him collector scholars, he was able to focus on sources largely unavailable to them to expand and often correct their understandings. Although since the establishment of the People's Republic Chinese research on China's modern coins has continued the investigation of the coins and sources, Richard's contribution has been to bring into focus the wealth of information available in British archives and collections. These sources have been particularly rich in new information and new understandings. - Joe Cribb""

See Francois Thierry's reivew of this publication here: https://www.academia.edu/5562713/Compte-rendu_de_Richard_N._J._WRIGHT_The_Modern_Coinage_of_China_1866-1949_The_Evidence_in_Western_Archives_Joe_Cribb_et_Helen_Wang_editeurs_Spink_Londres_2012_Revue_Numismatique_2013_pp._673-678

In this course we will examine a variety of literature-poetry, short stories, and novelswritten by Southern authors and set in the American South. We will place particular focus on the post-World War II literature of the Southern Gothic. Students will be introduced to the particular artistry and concerns of Southern histories, cultures, and varieties of experience through a diverse group of authors. Important themes and issues emerging from our readings and discussion will include racism,

Richard Wright's Native Son has often been read as a socially-oriented text, seemingly neglecting its existence as a literary construct. Such readings gear towards identifying the text with such societal ills as racism and environmental impact on the individual, as if these are the only business of the text.In this paper, however, attention shifts from such external referents to the text itself, deconstructing the meaning of blindness already ascribed to the text as well as the meaning of silence as it is denotatively known. The uncovering of the textual meaning of each of these concepts will also serve either to compliment a character or to disparage same, and then the interweave of both concepts will result in reading the text as a tragedy. This study will be anchored on the provisions of Derrida's deconstructive criticism.

Founded in March 1946, Harlem, New York’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic was the first outpatient psychiatric clinic established in and for a black community in the United States. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, writer Richard Wright, and clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic was both a practical response to the need for low-cost psychotherapy and counseling for black residents of New York City (many of whom were newly-arrived migrants) and a radical precursor to nation-wide campaigns to address disparities in the mental healthcare of African Americans. This article places the Lafargue Clinic’s history and legacy in conversation with the fraught role of race in the history of psychotherapy—fraught in the sense of how concepts of race and practices of racism have played a determining role in how established American psychiatry has approached the treatment of racialized populations and how these populations have experienced their encounters and/or exclusions from psychiatric mental healthcare.

African-American literature stands out for its interest in using the literary field as a way to protest and mainly to denounce social contexts marked by the use of oppression and violence. In this context, stands out in the literary scenario the novel Native Son (1940), written by the African-American writer Richard Wright, who describes through its protagonist Bigger Thomas, the painful details and psychological problems that characterize the black experience in a social context marked by oppression and violence. So, the present paper aims at developing some considerations about the African-American
experience depicted in Richard Wright‟s novel during the racial segregation period and attempts to examine how the social context interferes in its protagonist‟s psychology. To do so, we based our analysis on the studies developed by Brookshaw (1983), Bhabha (1998), Woodward (2009) e Silva (2009).

In this book, I argue that black atheists reject belief in God more for political than epistemological reasons.  The God-concept was frequently used as an ideological instrument for subjugating and violating blacks.  Therefore, to make a more just polity possible, atheism is a political must.  Included here is the introduction to the book.

Black masculinity is a highly convoluted social concept. It is nearly impossible to define Black masculinity without referring to its antithesis, White hegemonic masculinity. White hegemonic masculinity, according to Josef Benson’s text, Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, derives from the basic social characteristics of White, rural men. Benson argues that these men are often personified in literature and film as saviors rescuing the White race from “savage Native Americans” (xii). These basic characteristics of White, hegemonic masculinity are still prevalent in 21st century America and have been adopted by the collective White social structure. Most White men are groomed to lead and protect their homes/families from the outside infiltrations of Black, brown, and indigenous people men. White men are often characterized as triumphant heroes, whereas Black men are characterized as aggressors. Prolific literary figures of the African American literary canon have long sought to resolve the racial and gender discrepancy. In the late 19th Century, W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington codifies the concept of a Black hegemonic masculinity that limits black male performance. In other words, Washington believes that the masculinity of black men is dependent upon their ability to assimilate into the larger white society. Dubois believes that the masculinity of black men is dependent upon their intellectual prowess. From those two Victorian thinkers our present day ideals of Black masculinity are not culturally relevant. As a result, African American literary figures challenged (and continue to challenge) DuBois and Washington’s notion of black manhood.   
Readers can draw inferences of Black masculinity through the short stories of renowned African American authors such as Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960), Richard Wright (1908-1960), James Baldwin (1924-1987), and Alice Walker (1944).

Hue Woodson's "Heidegger, and The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream" is designed to complicate the critical understanding of existentialism in the three novels Wright wrote after his move to Paris. While The Outsider explicitly carries the label of an existentialist novel, Woodson notes, Savage Holiday and The Long Dream are also invested in Wright's approach to existentialism, since all three novels represent Wright's attempts to translate Sartre's French existentialism into Wright's understanding of what a black existentialism would look like. That translation, for Wright, is not just about interpreting his meaning of "existence in black" through Sartre's "being," or even about Wright appropriating Sartre's equivalency of existentialism with humanism, but, instead, it is much more about Wright attempting to confront Heidegger's "Dasein" more directly.

Assignment This critical writing assignment asks you to discuss any one or two of the texts on the syllabus. The topic is up to you to choose, though it is important that you do more than rehash class discussion. Given the length of the essay, you should focus on a topic that doesn't demand extensive background information, but instead allows you to make a clear, compelling thesis claim and support it with textual evidence efficiently.

Most of us have heard of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and have learned, as part of our high school history lessons, the critical role of the book in galvanizing public opinion against slavery in the 1850s. But despite the book’s prominent role in the watershed moment in African American history, African Americans have rejected it as untrue to their experience since it was first published.

JAMES V. HATCH & TED SHINE, eds., BLACK THEATER USA – PLAYS BY AFRICAN AMERICANS, THE RECENT PERIOD 1935-TODAY – THE FREE PRESS – NEW YORK NY – 1974-1996

Twenty-three authors, twenty-three plays covering a period of nearly sixty years (1935-1992) from the New Deal to the Clinton era. The plays are classified by theme which makes the book rather strange in a way instead of having chronological order: the value of a play does not come from the theme only but from the author and the period when it was written and performed. I will follow the book though to cover the twenty-three plays in the order of the book.

this paper analyzes the novel Black Boy by Richard Wright under the theme of 'Identity'.
The paper provides necessary examples where possible and tries to be as thorough as possible.
For the purpose of analysis, the paper is divided into two sections: childhood and adulthood. The theme of 'identity' is analyzed as per these two pointers which envelopes the entirety of Richard's life.

Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African American literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance through the period of the Black Arts Movement to the present. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the various ways in which African American literature both shapes and is shaped by the changing conditions under which it is produced, including segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among others. Students develop critical thinking and communication skills through discussion and exams as they cultivate knowledge of texts covering a wide range of genres, themes, styles, and points of view. Key topics to which the course returns throughout the semester include the representation of race and gender, social and economic mobility, freedom, community, identity, and nationalism, among others. Students will also reinforce analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills; build content knowledge; and expand computer and information literacy by pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, digital humanities project culminating in the presentation of a research paper. A blog will be used to host course-relevant internet resources discovered and annotated by students. The research paper will incorporate one or more texts from the syllabus, internet resources from the blog, and at least one non-literary primary text (film, painting, photograph, song, etc.) so as to illuminate relations between literary works and the social, political, economic, and artistic culture as a whole.

This seminar paper sheds light on the autobiographical influences in Richard Wright's non-fiction work. Many incidences in his childhood and early adult life have caused persistent scars in Wrights psyche that can also be detected in recurring themes in his literary work.

Course syllabus on mid-century critical debates between Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. The course looks at the meaning of the Black writer under regimes of antiblack racism, in particular the place of politics, aesthetics, and vernacular culture among strategies of testimony and resistance. As well, the course examines the strange mixture (or lack thereof) of national and international concerns in an historical moment characterized by global south revolution and liberation.

For the first time 10 writings by Richard Wright produced while on the Illinois Writers' Project were published in the Winter 2009 issue of Southern Quarterly celebrating the centenary of the novelist. An introduction by Brian Dolinar provides context for the essays.

Totality, in vogue in a wide variety of forms in the first half of the twentieth century, was roundly critiqued in the second half. Yet it's starting to revive in altered form. From the bad totalities of the earlier period (total war, the total artwork, totalitarianism, etc.) we've turned to more flexible models (of globalization, world literature, climate change, etc.). This course takes up the problem of totalities then and now through the prism of British Modernism (a grouping of literary texts that is itself a questionable totality). We'll read works that pursue an exhaustive depiction of their moment even as they call attention to the impossibility of such a project: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Richard Wright's Lawd Today!, and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. The course pairs these texts with totalities formulated and resisted by Saint-­‐Amour, Tsitsi Jaji and others. Roughly a third of the course's energies will be devoted to the ins and outs of archival research, manuscript studies, and textual scholarship. In addition to writing and revising a seminar paper based on their interests, students will give presentations on the textual history of the day's primary readings. Through the lens of totality, the course will introduce students to pressing topics in the field of modernist studies, from the modern epic to media ecology, " the archive " to empire, critique génétique to the environment.

Margaret Alexander Walker's poem "For My People" (1937) is a much anthologized piece that is still highly regarded as a literary work espousing Afro-Marxist ideology. This paper discusses elements of the text that reveal it as being an occult (esoteric) writing that carries the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and A.R. Orage in a subtext. The literary group that Walker belonged to in Chicago in the 1930s was an esoteric group disguised as Marxists. The essay is a close reading of Walker's poem that deciphers Walker's text.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of authors including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that postwar Italian intellectual impegno – defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform – was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated “myth of America” that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

{Elsasoa Jousse, McGill University} Richard Wright summarized the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in his travelogue The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conferenceas having “an element of ‘Asianism’ in the whole conference” (558). This citation implies a lack of African representation in the Bandung Conference, “the famous meeting of over two dozen Third World representatives” (Burton 1) from which the term “Afro-Asian solidarity” emerged, and throughout the following decades when its “spirit” continued to inspire those opposed to colonialism. Wright’s quotation also refers to a uniform representation of “Asianism,” which reveals the Orientalist aspects of the Western gaze an American, albeit an African American, casts on Asian people. The aim of this Honours essay is to explore the representation of Afro- Asian connections in literature arising from the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings published between 1967 and the early 1990s.

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois's Hegelian concept of 'double consciousness' , as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both 1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, 2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World—toward gratuitous messianic freedom.

1. THE WILLIE LYNCH LETTER AND THE MAKING OF A SLAVE – LUSHENA BOOKS

2. SEKOU MIMS, M.Ed ., MSW – LARRY HIGGINBOTTOM, MSW, LCSW – OMAR REID, Psy.D – POST TRAUMATIC SLAVERY DISORDER – PYRAMID BUILDERS , INC; - DORCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS – NO DATE, PROBABLY BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

3. DR. JOY DEGRUY – POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME, AMERICA’S LEGACY OF ENDURING INJURY AND HEALING – UPTON PRESS – JOY DEGRUY PUBLICATIONS INC. – PORTLAND, OREGON – 2005

4. DANIEL « CHÉRI-BIBI » PARIS-CLAVEL – DOMINIQUE MISSLIN – NDH MUSIC – BEFORE REGGAE – 2013

5. GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 - DVD

6. GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 – SIMON RATTLE – CD

7. JACQUES DE CAUNA – CECILE RÉVAUGER – LA SOCIÉTÉ DES EXPLOITATIONS ESCLAVAGISTES, CARAÎBES FRANCOPHONE, ANGLOPHONE, HISPANOPHONE, REGARDS CROISÉS

8. MUSÉE D’AQUITAINE – BORDEAUX [AU XVIIIe SIÈCLE] LE COMMERCE ATLANTIQUE ET L’ESCLAVAGE – 2010

9. RICHARD WRIGHT – UNCLE TOM’S CHILDREN – 1936

10. RICHARD WRIGHT – NATIVE SON - 1940

11. RICHARD WRIGHT – BLACK BOY – 1944/45

12. JAMES BALDWIN – SONNY’S BLUES – 1957

13. JAMES BALDWIN – THE AMEN CORNER – 1954

14. JAMES BALDWIN – JUST ABOVE MY HEAD – 1979

15. JAMES BALDWIN – JUST ABOVE MY HEAD – 1979 – AN OLDER REVIEW ON AMAZON.COM March 6, 2004

Several scholars have looked at Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” as a work that criticizes black culture for not providing a strong foundation for its race but places hope in the idea that African Americans will overcome and defeat racism. They also looked at it as a testament of struggle over black subjectivity in a racist society. Other scholars viewed Adichie’s “Americanah” as a text that has narratives of race weaved into it. They looked at it as a text where the characters struggle for identity. They all overlooked the issue of unhomeliness which left the characters in both texts yearning for a better life in a better place other than their current homestead. This research work further reveals the unhomely situation as prompting individuals to work towards creating a home for themselves in an unaccommodating environment. The unhomely situations and its workings bring to fore the aspects of the society which initially were not noticed.

Richard Wright's The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference has long been a fundamental book in Bandung historiography. As a crucial companion volume to The Color Curtain, Roberts and Foulcher's Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and The Bandung Conference showcases the previously unknown side of Wright's Bandung narrative, as told from the perspectives of the vibrant group of Indonesian intellectuals and writers who hosted him in Indonesia in 1955. Showcasing Wright’s previously unknown interactions with Indonesian modernists and his previously unknown lecturing activities in Indonesia, this book has major implications for any reading of postcolonial history and culture after the Asian-African Conference of 1955.

Lawrence Jackson does a fine survey of African American writing from the 1930s through 1960.  Particularly insightful is his discussion of Richard Wright, whose work set the stage for a massive critique of white liberals.  Wright would never have taken that critique as far as the Black Power intellectuals of the sixties did, but that's precisely why this book is so fascinating.  It intelligently charts the evolution of ideas.  Less convincing in this book are some of Jackson's claims about J. Saunders Redding.  Despite this weakness, this is a solid book.

This article is an exploration of two forces that come into play in the
development of epistemic and legal practices of exclusion: (1)
invisibility conditioned by racial criminalization and (2) its disenfranchising effect on particularly black people well into the present.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Several scholars have looked at Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” as a work that criticizes black culture for not providing a strong foundation for its race but places hope in the idea that African Americans will overcome and defeat racism. They also looked at it as a testament of struggle over black subjectivity in a racist society. Other scholars viewed Adichie’s “Americanah” as a text that has narratives of race weaved into it. They looked at it as a text where the characters struggle for identity. They all overlooked the issue of unhomeliness which left the characters in both texts yearning for a better life in a better place other than their current homestead. This research work further reveals the unhomely situation as prompting individuals to work towards creating a home for themselves in an unaccommodating environment. The unhomely situations and its workings bring to fore the aspects of the society which initially were not noticed.

Beb Vuyk's article brings crucial new context to Richard Wright's landmark book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. For more information, see her article as it appears in Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference.

https://www.academia.edu/10927987/Indonesian_Notebook_A_Sourcebook_on_Richard_Wright_and_the_Bandung_Conference_Duke_University_Press_pre-order_2015_

Aiming to reopen discussions about what constituted literary realism in the Black Chicago Renaissance, this essay argues that William Attaway’s novel Blood on the Forge (1941) engages what Robert Young calls “disalienation,” a theoretical practice that “interpellates and then alienates the reader to produce new subjectivities.” I examine the theoretical relationship between sociological methodology and Marxist analysis within the movement: a relationship that, in Attaway’s case, did not produce a documentary work anchored in simple reflection, but rather served as the basis for a dialectical-materialist (or “disalienating”) realism that united both the concrete and abstract aspects of social experience.

Hostis humani generis, meaning “enemy of humankind,” is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization.

Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.

http://www.upne.com/1512600155.html

This paper explores the impact of the conceptual boundary created by the notions of lawfulness and lawlessness on the individual. Law in Western culture is a goal-oriented instrument of state. The legal limits established in legislative acts and judicial decisions delineate a territory for potential action. As a normative domain, law guides human conduct in the process of individual practical reasoning. In states where codes and statutes go against natural human inclinations, individuals view the conceptual boundary of law as a challenge, which leads to conflicts between the system and the individual. I analyze such a conflict in the personal narrative of Bigger Thomas, the main protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son. The growing tension caused by the discriminatory system of Jim Crow laws ends in the character crossing legal- and custom-determined boundaries.