In The Color Curtain (1956), Wright provides a report of the Bandung Conference that was held in Kuala Lumpur between April 18th and 25th 1955. Wright represents the meeting in paradoxical ways that reveal both his disdain of traditions and religions and his respect for Asian African solidarity at the same time. The Color Curtain has condescending and patronizing statements about the Asian informants with whom Wright talked prior to the Bandung Conference and the African and Asian delegates whose speeches he heard at the summit. Wright’s irreverent remarks about Asians and Africans reveal prejudices that contradict the criticisms that he makes in the book about the impact of European colonialism on people of color.
Yet The Color Curtain also contains occasional statements in which Wright openly declares his support for the independence of Asians and Africans from Western colonialism. Like most of the Asian and African delegates at the Bandung Conference, Wright predicted the clashes that could occur between the West and the Third World when the former’s colonial experience has lingering effects that sustain the wall of socio-economic, cultural, and political oppression on the previously-colonized nations of Asia and Africa that the concept of “The Color Curtain” identifies. He uses the concept of the “color curtain” to describe “mighty,” “turbulent,” and “stormy” currents of racially defined oppositions that Westerners set in “human intercourse” (194). This meaning of the term “The Color Curtain” is suggested in a Jeffrey J. Folk’s argument that “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” (79).
In an attempt to understand The Color Curtain’s representation of the prolonged effect of colonialism on newly independent countries, this essay examines the book’s representation of Asians and Africans and the positions that Wright took in the resistance of these people against their former colonizers during troubling times when he was personally also involved in the liberation struggle of African Americans. A crucial question is: How does Wright anticipate in The Color Curtain the current crisis in the relationships between the West and the formerly colonized countries hereafter called “the Third World”? In asking these questions, this essay hopes to uncover the blend of radicalism and self-righteousness in Wright’s attitudes towards Asians and Africans.
Literature Review
Most studies of Wright’s relationships with people of color outside of the United States tend to focus on Africans. While such scholarships which include Chimalum Nwankwo’s “Richard Wright: A Dubious Legacy” (1996), John Cullen Gruesser’s Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa (2000), and Femi Ojo-Ade’s “Africa and America: A Question of Continuities, Cleavage, and Dreams Deferred” (1996) overlook Wright’s exploration of the relationships between Africans and Asian, they successfully represent the author’s ambivalence towards Africa. For instance, Ojo-Ade contends that Wright “cast Africa out of his psyche” (16) and that “his [Wright’s] self-hate, resulting from White racism and Black rootlessness, pushes him to become the Outsider” (15).
Moreover, scholars of Wright’s attitudes towards Blacks have represented them mainly in terms of his discontinuities and ruptures from the Third World. For instance, S. Shankar describes Wright’s representation of Africa as primitivism. Using Wright’s Black Power (1953) as an example, Shankar argues that the book depicts the Gold Coast as “[being] ontologically of a primitive status in relation to the West to which he [Wright] belongs” (14). Establishing connections between Black Power and The Color Curtain, Shankar states:
In The Color Curtain, for example, Wright declares after surveying the behavior of Asian delegates traveling to the Bandung Conference in the same aircraft as his, “It was rapidly dawning on me that if the men of the West were political [i.e. scientific and rational] animals, then the men of the East were religious animals.” (14)
Although they are grounded on actual evidence from Wright’s writings and life, Shankar’s statement weakens The Color Curtain’s significance as a narrative of resistance against Western colonialism. Despite its arrogance towards Africa and Asia, The Color Curtain is a nationalist text since it explores the consequences of colonialism on Africans and Asians and suggests alternatives to the effects of colonial violence in the Third World.
In addition, Wright’s book reveals connections between the racial situation in the United States and colonialism in the Third World. As M. Lynn Weiss suggests, in spite of his resistance to the worldview of Africans, Wright “saw a parallel to the American experience of a colonial people’s struggle to become an independent nation” (24).
While he continued to develop condescending and Eurocentric remarks about Africans and Asians, Wright remained committed to their freedom from the West, even when his individualism and elitism contradicted his association with African political leaders such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah. Wright shared with these leaders a respite for Western expropriation of Africa’s resources and the belief that the struggle for Third World independence would endure as long as racial and ethnic prejudices and poverty continued to affect the lives of colonized peoples.
In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy decries the ways in which critics have avoided to examine the anti-essentialist concept of race in Wright’s writings and “the fortifications which critics have placed between the work [Wright] produced in America and the supposedly inferior products of his European exile” (155). One way to fill these gaps is to discuss Wright’s anti-essentialist concept of race in the framework of his participation in Asian and African anti-colonial resistance against exploitation. This method shows the assiduous ways in which Wright invested his life and talent in Third World struggle.
Wright’s Views on African Asian Solidarity
Wright’s image of African Asian unity is apparent in the interviews he had with Asian individuals before the Bandung Conference and in his interpretation of the speeches that were delivered at the convention. In both contexts, Wright suggests a blend of condescension and admiration for Third World nationalism. On the one hand, he represents the Africans and Asians delegates with contempt as political figures that he saw as reinforcing colonialism through cultural and religious essentialism. Yet, on the other hand, he occasionally depicts these leaders with esteem by rallying with their solidarity and struggle against racialism and colonialism.
Wright’s positive representation of Third World nationalism is visible in the spirit of solidarity that he felt with the Asians and Africans at Bandung. The conference was one of the first and largest meetings of the twentieth century between leaders from Africa and Asia. Merze Tate explains: “Here in the young Republic of Indonesia assembled representatives of twenty-nine nations and a billion and a half people, or fifty-three percent of the world’s population, from 12,606,938 square miles of the earth’s surface” (263). The participants included Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of the Gold Coast [current Ghana], Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, Chou En Lai, Premier of China, Ho Chi Minh, Prime Minister of Vietnam, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of the United States.
By listing the objectives of the conference, Wright suggests their practical and urgent nature and his desire to see them achieved. In this sense, Wright recognized that the Bandung meeting was important in its own right as an opportunity for Asians and Africans to develop common strategies that could allow them to free and modernize their countries and play vital roles in international relations and world security.
Yet Wright’s identification with Third World resistance of Western oppression in The Color Curtain is problematic because he develops acerbic and paternalistic opinions about the solidarity among the Asian and African personalities whose dilemma he seems to understand. Though he acknowledges the nationalist nature of the Bandung Conference, he expresses prejudices towards it by representing the nations who organized it as religion countries.
Wright’s Early Stereotypes of Bandung
In The Color Curtain, Wright’s Western stereotypes about Asians are apparent in a questionnaire that he had compiled with the help of the sociologist Otto Klineberg weeks before he arrived in Indonesia. Using this survey, he collected the responses of educated Asians of different nations and occupations about the role of nationalism, traditions, Western culture, and religion in their postcolonial states.
According to Reilly, Wright treats the people he meets “solely as informants, vessels without character … [and] as spokespeople without unique voice” (512). The evidence in The Color Curtain strongly supports Reilly’s thesis. In the book, Wright describes an Indonesian-born Dutch journalist as being “more European in attitude than most Europeans; having been born in Indonesia but educated in Holland, he had felt a high degree of consciousness about his European values and possessed a detachment that made for straight answers” (26).
Ironically, Wright develops towards Asians and Africans the same kind of prejudices that he criticizes in the views of his interviewees. Wright’s orientalism is evident in Bill Mullen analysis in Afro-Orientalism of “His [Wright’s] characterization of the Asian and African populations at Bandung as a ‘gummy mass’ [which] dissolved images of class solidarity or collective militancy into the nondescript figure of a helpless horde discursively invisible behind the color curtain” (66). This orientalism is also apparent in the problematic views on the religiosity of the Bandung participants that Wright demonizes at the same time when he tries to identify with their critique of colonialism.
Though he initially believed that the conference was going to deal mainly about Red China and the U.S. policy in Asia and the Pacific and not on slavery and the French’s forced cultural assimilation of Africans, Wright was surprised to see that the conference addressed the impact of imperialism on Africans and Asians. In the first speech, the President Ahmed Sukarno, of Indonesia, paid homage to “Sacrifices made by our forefathers and by the people of our own and younger generations” (137). Sukarno’s tribute to African Asian solidarity was founded on the shared history of imperialism of the two people. He said: “For many generations our peoples have been the voiceless ones in the world. We have been the unregarded, the peoples for whom decisions were made by others whose interests were paramount, the peoples who lived in poverty and humiliation” (139).
Conclusion
In this sense, Wright developed ambivalence towards Africans and Asians whose status as rightful opponents of an oppressive Western racialism and imperialism he strongly supported. Yet the book also shows Wright’s support for the ideologies of Third World anti-racialism, national sovereignty, peace, development, and resistance against Western colonialism. His support for these ideologies is visible in his examination of his relationships with Africans and Asians who were involved in independence struggles during the 1950s. Therefore, Wright developed a subtle form of nationalism that is apparent in the connections between Asians and Africans that he makes in his interpretation of the speeches that were delivered at the meeting.