"The uses and hazards of expatriation": Richard Wright's cosmopolitanism in process.

"I'm a rootless man," Richard Wright declares boldly in White Man Listen! (1957), "but I m neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it" (xxix). In this and in many other statements, Wright claims for himself, and decidedly embraces, the status of the rootless cosmopolitan, the man who does "not hanker after, and seem[s] not to need, as many emotional attachments, sustaining roots, or idealistic allegiances as most people" (xxix). This radically solitary position, Wright "confesses" to his (presumably American) reader, "is no personal achievement of mine.... I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experiences that I have fallen heir to" (xxix). His historical situatedness, Wright suggests, as a black man in the racist United States, as an American who does not "belong" to the American community, and as a foreigner experiencing the French and African political climates of the 1950s, produced in him an outlook that rejects tradition and community in favor of what we might call a Cynic cosmopolitanism. After all, it was Diogenes the Cynic who first called himself a kosmopolites, a "citizen of the world," and who famously refused, as Martha Nussbaum explains in her controversial essay "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" (1996), "to be defined by his local origins and group memberships ... instead, he defined himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns" (6-7). In a similar spirit, Wright declared that he was perfectly able and happy to "make [him]self at home almost anywhere on this earth" (White Man xxix). Fulfilling this capacity, however, turned out to be more difficult than he had hoped.

To aspire to cosmopolitanism, as Wright's life demonstrates, is to set one's self a demanding task, to invite failure. Nevertheless, it is precisely from both his successes and his failures that we can learn valuable lessons about the development of a cosmopolitan outlook. Wright's life and work show that the rootless, detached--Cynic--brand of cosmopolitanism that he passionately proclaimed in several of his writings is hard, if not impossible, to sustain in lived experience. Even more interesting, however, is that Wright's actions and writings were inconsistent with his proclamations of radical independence. Despite his occasional Cynic outbreaks, overall, he embraced a much more Stoic brand of cosmopolitanism, one that, starting from a necessarily specific geo-historical position, continues to strive for human solidarity across national and racial boundaries. Rather than condemning the resulting inconsistencies as failures or evidence of dishonesty, deceit, or disingenuity, we might consider them a necessary and nearly inevitable part of the cosmopolitan endeavor: cosmopolitanism, I think, is best understood as a permanent, "in-process" pursuit. (1)

As Kwame Anthony Appiah asserts in his 2006 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, "There's a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge" (xv). While Appiah is well aware of the challenges that cosmopolitanism poses to the individual, and stresses the centrality of the conversation (in its widest sense) in facing or overcoming those challenges, nowhere does he fully clarify how we should lead such conversations--itself a difficult theoretical and practical issue. Richard Wright's life and writings yield insight into the difficulty of being truly cosmopolitan; they reveal how we can, if not remedy, at least alleviate that difficulty. Read through theories of intercultural hermeneutics provided by German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, theories that stress historical situatedness and the significance of the prejudice for (intercultural) understanding, Wright's writings insinuate an "in-process" approach to cosmopolitanism that favors the process of becoming a world citizen over its final outcome. Cosmopolitanism is understood here, then, as a complex dialogical practice in which the cosmopolitan ideal figures permanently as a yet-to-be-accomplished and yet-to-be-fully-defined utopia. (2) The question thus becomes how individual persons can act towards the creation of conditions that would allow for the development of such a utopia.

As an African American in 20th-century America, Wright occupied an outsider-insider position in his home country; he cultivated what he called his "double vision," a Du Boisian double consciousness, a power that facilitated his cosmopolitan development. Wright's painful location both inside and outside of American society--to say nothing of the larger Western world--prepared him for the kind of "border thinking" that Walter Mignolo considers prerequisite to a cosmopolitanism not determined by the hegemonic center. According to Mignolo, border thinking allows for "the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern positions" (736). Wright's life and work occasion a reconsideration of cosmopolitanism from the position of border thinking, however. In addition, because the writer deserted the US to declare himself a citizen of the world with a radicalism paralleled by few other American intellectuals, he illustrates the in-process nature of cosmopolitan practice.

Coming to Terms with Cosmopolitanism(s)

In the ancient Greek usage, a kosmopolites, or "citizen of the world," was generally a man who valued the idea that all human beings belong to a single community. Defining cosmopolitanism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown differentiate between two consecutive stages in Greek thought on cosmopolitanism, each of which drives this premise to a different conclusion. In the Cynic tradition, which dates back to Diogenes of Sinope, the cosmopolitan rejects all communal responsibilities by claiming to be a natural citizen of the cosmos--and nothing else. This cosmopolitan outlook is therefore framed by a negative claim, a rejection of all concrete allegiances. (3) The Stoic philosophers developed Cynic thought on world citizenship further and differently. Rather than rejecting all allegiances, the Stoic sees himself as a man whose primary allegiance is to a global community of human beings, while simultaneously allowing himself special loyalties to local or more specific communities. This claim is thus positive, emphasizing a proliferation of attachments.

Most current discussions of cosmopolitanism trace their lineage from the Greek Stoics and/or Cynics through Immanuel Kant's famous (and deeply euro centric) essay on Perpetual Peace (1795). They often emphasize, however, as do those by Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, that we can no longer assume a single version of cosmopolitanism and should instead work with pluralistic "cosmopolitanism(s)" (Robbins 2). (4) How we define the supposedly universal values that define these cosmopolitanism(s), they argue, is based on our perspectives, and those perspectives are conditioned by our specific historical/geographical situatedness. In short, what we value depends largely on the cultural-ideological formations in which we participate. The problem with the multiple cosmopolitanisms referenced by Robbins and Cheah is that some persons are more likely to be heard than others--the "center," or the dominant of any given culture, tends to shape values such that the cosmopolitanism that emerges risks silencing the very Others it claims to recognize. This likelihood is why Mignolo insists that what he calls "critical'--read non-hegemonic--cosmopolitanism can only be (re)conceived from the perspective of the "hidden face of modernity": coloniality. (5) In Mignolo's view, "cosmopolitanism today has to become border thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those ... that had to deal all along with global designs" (744). (6) Only the perspectives of the marginalized and oppressed, he argues, can at this point offer visions of what it might truly mean to be world citizens. Otherwise, we are going to fall back into the same trap again and again, just as Kant did, and what we believe to be cosmopolitanism will end up being a justification of the inequalities of the world as it is.

Wright's double vision, born out of the dubious privilege of being an outsider-insider to US society and Western modernity as a whole, seems to exemplify Mignolo's notion of border-thinking. While Wright's border-thinking initially resulted from subjection to American racism, his life as an expatriate outsider in French and, to some extent, Ghanaian and other societies placed him on new margins. The border-thinking inherent in Wright's marginalized perspective within the US was amplified by his repeated dislocations and resulting exposure to European and African cultures. His expatriation also distanced him further still from US society, including the black community with which he still felt some identification and which now saw him, by and large, as having abandoned the struggle. (7) Thus, his marginalization was both deepened and broadened, as he became ever less a part of his "own" society, and a part--but only in part--of ever more societies.

Richard Wright's Cosmopolitan Contradictions

Weary of the increasingly hostile US racial climate, Wright and his family accepted a 1946 invitation by the French ministry of culture to spend a year in Paris. After his marriage to a white, Jewish woman led to more racist harassment at home, in 1947 Wright decided to move his family permanently to the French capital; in his own words, Paris was characterized by "such an absence of race hate that it seem[ed] a little unreal" (qtd. in Fabre 306). Soon Wright was joined in Paris by other African Americans, many of them ex-soldiers taking advantage of the GI Bill. He became one of the leading figures of this "new lost generation" that included James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Olli Harrington, and many other popular African American writers and artists. (8) All of them were fleeing a US social climate poisonous with racial discrimination and anti-communist propaganda and persecution. In Paris, they were able to escape such harassment, while immersing themselves in one of the major contact zones of the Pan-African movement that, as Brent Hayes Edwards shows in The Practice of Diaspora, "allowed boundary crossing, conversations, and collaborations that were available nowhere else to the same degree" (4). Wright was very much part of these conversations and collaborations, which were deeply concerned with the joint struggle of black and African people against Western oppression. However, as Kevin Gaines observes in a 2001 article, Wright's position in the Pan-African movement was complicated by his rejection of "Negritude, the politically charged assertion by some Francophone African nationalists of a transhistorical, transnational black cultural unity" (76). Wright rejected such black essentialism in favor of "modern" (non-primordial) political coalitions, and, in the same vein, formed at times close relationships to the (white) intelligentsia of France, which further disconcerted his black peers.

Wright's sudden and premature death in 1960 at the age of 52 gave James Baldwin reason to speculate about "the uses and hazards of expatriation." Some of Wright's former friends in the expatriate community in France, Baldwin argues, felt that he had perhaps been away from "home" too long such that he had made a mistake by "cut[ting] himself off from his roots" (Baldwin 203). Many of them, including Baldwin himself, "distrusted his association with the French intellectuals, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and company," because it seemed to them "that there was very little they could give him which he could use" (Baldwin 184). Rather, the French existentialists were thought to corrupt, if not destroy, the authenticity of Wright's (black) vision. Wright's declarations of (racial) rootlessness in his later writings certainly did not help things. Baldwin remembers that an African had once told him "with a small, mocking laugh: 'I believe he thinks he's white'" (203). (9)

What alienated Wright's friends in Paris made his critics in the US even more uneasy. Cut loose from his original concerns and context, they argued, Wright had become intellectually homeless, a lonely wanderer in a strange world to which he did not belong. Later critics, such as Appiah, joined that chorus. Wright's trip to the Gold Coast, Appiah argued in 1987, was "yet another quest for a place of his own," a quest that failed miserably (188). Wright's rejection of "a racial explanation," Appiah wrote, made it impossible for him to go to Africa on grounds of racial commonality, and without those grounds, he fell pray to a "paranoid hermeneutics': the need to distance himself from the black "natives" in Western (white) arrogance, embracing thereby the logic of his own oppressor.

Between then and now, the dismissal of Black Power and others of Wright's later works has often been challenged. Defenses of Wright's later works date back at least as far as Cedric Robinson's 1983 claiming of Wright as a major thinker within the Western Marxist tradition (see Black Marxism). Most current defenses, however, build on Paul Gilroy's assertion in The Black Atlantic (1993) that Wright was a major thinker of Western modernity, seeking "complex answers to the questions which racial and national identities could only obscure" (173). Kevin Gaines reconsiders Wright from the perspective of diaspora in his 2001 "Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora," urging a view of Wright as a proponent of a black diaspora that is not to be understood in the more "conventional usage" of "describing a state of alienation resulting from a physical exile or displacement from an ancestral homeland" (77). Instead, Gaines suggests, Wright's discussion of anticolonialism in Black Power and The Color Curtain (1956) "recasts diaspora as the mobilization of black modernity toward a transnational and transracial community of struggle" (76). Although he follows Gilroy in stressing the transnational and transracial aspects of Wright's thinking, Gaines does not take up Gilroy's claim, expressed in both The Black Atlantic and Against Race, that Wright's outlook was cosmopolitan, preferring instead the concept of black diaspora explicated in Brent Hayes Edward's work.

While diaspora and cosmopolitanism share some overlap in their positions relative to the nation, both suggesting the transcendence of national boundaries in favor of broader solidarities, they also signify very different concepts. Diaspora, as Edwards explains it, "raises issues of community beyond the nation-state which are unavoidably fractured by difference." (10) Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, constitutes, in its ideal form, a global and indiscriminate solidarity that is not defined by any specific community, instead reaching out to every human being inhabiting the cosmos. Cosmopolitanism, then, is a more abstract solidarity, one that asks us to empathize with and stand by Others with whom we have (or seem to have) very little in common. This empathy is why it is imperative, as Ross Posnock reminds us in "The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism" (2002), that we recognize that the Other is not nearly as other as it might seem. "By making recognition of one's common humanity, rather than recognition of difference, the goal of a just social order," Posnock argues, "a post-identity cosmopolitanism is an ideal that extends freedom within modernity, especially to those who have been branded as scapegoats, as exotics, as modernity's Other" (808). And we can add, with Walter Mignolo, that to accomplish this ideal, modernity must first start listening to those Others.

In his later work, Wright was interested in exactly this project: extending freedom within modernity to modernity's Others by engaging with them. His own marginalized position within US society had early led him to think through and speak loudly about questions of race and nation. With his departure from the US, he continued to expand his thinking, looking for political allies in his struggle against racism and imperialist oppression outside of America's borders. To do so, it seems, he decided it necessary to be radically free, free to choose his own way to live as well as his allies and comrades. His bold declarations of Cynic cosmopolitan detachment, accompanied by his official abandonment of both the US and the Communist Party, suggest a desire to transcend the constraints imposed on him by (US) history. If he described himself in White Man Listen! as a "rootless man," he renounced his belonging even more radically in Pagan Spain (1957): "I have no religion in the formal sense of the word.... I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I'm obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I'm free. I have only the future" (21). Wright's perspective parallels that of Cross Damon, the black antihero in his novel The Outsider (1953), who, after a freak accident in the Chicago subway, takes on the identity of one of the fatalities and decides to leave everything that previously determined his life behind: religion, social responsibilities, and, almost absurdly, even race. Quite unlike Wright, however, Damon, whose nihilistic worldview attributes godlike power to his own person, ends up killing four people and causing the suicide of the women he--against his will and determination--loves. After being mortally wounded, Damon realizes that he can transcend neither his race nor his human condition.

It seems bizarre that Wright would reward Damon's perspective with such a terrible epiphany, only to proclaim four years later his own radical independence from all markers of belonging: religion, nationality, traditions, and even, as in Damon's case, race. This bizarre situation, however, seems also symptomatic of Wright's central dilemma, as it appears in The Outsider and Wright's later nonfiction books, and also much earlier in Native Son (1940), the naturalistic framework of the first two books and the existentialist tone of the third of which have been oft-noted. (11) Wright seems torn between a sociohistorical and determinative view of the individual as without power and agency, and an existentialist view that gives the individual full agency and freedom, as well as the associated responsibility. Whenever he adheres to one of these two philosophies, the other is guaranteed to intrude sooner or later.

Why, then, would Wright place himself at one extreme--that of total freedom from attachment--despite his awareness of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of such a project? Perhaps because he believed that his double vision as an outsider-insider made him a man "ahead of his rime" with a vision superior? Looking at his statement in Pagan Spain, one could conclude that, like Cross Damon, Wright thought that he could or even had to use this "privileged" vision to free himself from all sociohistorical as well as biological determinations. It seems that after a lifetime of racialized discrimination, he wanted to break free from all constraints and attachments, like Diogenes the Cynic. Like Cross Damon, however, he remained forever shaped and inhibited by them--and this characteristic, too, he seems to have recognized.

No work of Wright's better exhibits his contradiction than Black Power. Wright's travelogue about his trip to the British Gold Coast impressively exposes not only his failure to deliver a politically correct narrative about Africa, but also--less frequently observed--his inability to live up to his own claim to be a rootless man, at home in the world. Subtitled "a record of reactions in a land of pathos," Black Power is exactly that: a record of Wright's own awkward relationship to the challenge of his "African heritage." Confronted with "fantastic scenes" (42) filled with "half-nude black people," "monstrously swollen legs," "monstrously unbiblical hernias," and other monstrosities (43), Wright constantly interrogates himself, trying to assess how and whether he can or must relate to the Africans he encounters. And, more often than not, he shudders with Western distaste and delicacy. He cannot come to terms with the sight of publicly exposed black breasts, refers again and again to those "long, fleshy, tubelike teat[s]," "some reaching twelve or eighteen inches ... hanging loosely and flapping," which African women "do not bother" to give their babies in front of men (42). Nor can he, an atheist, accept tribal rituals or superstitions. He perceives them as examples of pre-modern irrationality that make the Gold Coast "pathetic," inferior to the Western rationality he knows. Life in Accra turns out to be overwhelming and nauseating: "The kaleidoscope of sea, jungle, nudity, mud huts, and crowded market places induced in me a conflict deeper than I was aware of; a protest against what I saw seized me. I waited irrationally for these fantastic scenes to fade; I had the foolish feeling that I had but to turn my head and I'd see the ordered, clothed streets of Paris" (Black Power 42).

Such passages have attracted the ire of Anthony Appiah and others. The introductory scene of Black Power, in which Wright ponders his possibly "strange and disturbing" racialized relations to Africa, "evokes nothing so much as Conradian dread," according to Appiah, "a dread, intensified, no doubt, by the thought that Wright, the Afro-American, already has the horror stirring 'in the depths' of him, even in the tranquility of Paris" ('A Long Way" 178). Appiah apparently refers to Joseph Conrad's 1900 novel, Heart of Darkness. And conceived superficially, Wright's travelogue does invite the sort of criticism that Chinua Achebe heaped on Conrad in his 1975 lecture, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Appiah executes virtually the same movement as Achebe, and moreover, emphasizes as most unforgivable that Wright, unlike Conrad, is black himself.

The parallels between Wright's and Conrad's texts are indeed striking. Both books present first-person narrators who depart from England for West Africa, on uncertain (albeit different) missions. Both texts are at least partly autobiographical; Conrad fictionalized his experiences in the Belgian Congo, and Wright admittedly used fictional techniques to embellish the chronicle of his trip to the Gold Coast and throughout Ghana. In both cases, also, an unreliable narrator tells the story. Conrad filters his story of Marlowe and Kurtz through two layers of narration, one unnamed, and one--Marlowe--obviously unreliable since he merely repeats hear-say from an untrustworthy original source.

The narrator of Wright's "record of reactions" is clearly Wright himself. However, as James T. Campbell proves in Middle Passages (2006), "as an imaginative artist, steeped in Conrad, [Wright] inherited an image of Africa as a dark mysterious place" (296). Furthermore, Campbell argues, "when reading his travel diary, one is chiefly struck by Wright's own psychological instability. He had always been volatile, but never were his mood swings more extreme and seemingly erratic than during his time in Africa, where the combination of heat and unfamiliarity appears to have produced a kind of emotional meltdown" (300). Given that "most of Black Power was assembled by cutting and pasting from his travel diary" (James T. Campbell 309), readers must expect to confront an unreliable narrator in this text, too--although the unreliability in Black Power is much less controlled and deliberate than in Conrad's novel. This important difference notwithstanding, several scholars, among them Ngwarsungu Chiwengo and S. Shankar, have recently explored the interesting similarities between the two works. (12)

Both Heart of Darkness and Black Power offer similarly vivid descriptions of a West African climate that seems to be almost unbearably brutal--and sickening--for a Westerner. While this similarity may seem inconsequential, one might not expect the text of a Polish white man in the service of the British Empire to coincide with the account of an African American visitor theoretically not writing about a people under well-entrenched colonial rule, but instead depicting a nation at the height of its liberation struggle. (13)

Achebe complains frequently about Conrad's extensive use of blackness and of pars pro toto in his depictions of Africans, offering only speechless, fragmented black limbs and "gleaming white eyes" in some wild, uncontrolled frenzy. Wright, in turn, as Appiah and other critics have pointed out, offers accounts of "a swirling knot of men and women; they were dancing in a wide circle barefooted, shuffling to the demonical beat of drums" (Black Power 139). And when he leaves the dancing crowd, puzzled and estranged, he states, "I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, but my blackness didn't help me" (Black Power 140). If Achebe complains that "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization" (252), one could certainly argue that Wright is guilty of the same projections, not least in his repeated expressions of indignation over bare breasts and public urination.

S. Shankar reaches conclusions similar to Appiah's in his more textured reading of Black Power, where he claims that "by rendering the Gold Coast 'pathetic,' [Wright] assimilates the country and its inhabitants to a powerful Western discourse of alterity" (18). Wright sees himself as a Western stranger in the Gold Coast, a cultural outsider who is different as well as distant. Throughout the text, he defines himself as American by nationality, and as Western by culture. Regardless of skin color or racial heritage, he is a Western intellectual raised and (self-)educated in the cultural realm generated by Christianity and Enlightenment, and therefore an outsider to African society. That he is an outsider to Western society as well--a second-class citizen at best-gives him a particular perspective on this cultural heritage, but does not alter the fact that his value system is thoroughly Western. As James T. Campbell puts it in Middle Passages, "even 'open-minded' travelers ... view the world through specific cultural and historical lenses.... The fact that some travelers possess black skin does not necessarily inoculate them against this influence, though it often complicates their reactions" (384). This complication perhaps explains the astonishing parallels between Black Power and Heart of Darkness. The cultural commonalities between Conrad and Wright are far more substantial than their national, temporal, and racial differences. Read this way, Wright not only falls short in the eyes of critics like Appiah, for whom he has surrendered "racial authenticity," but, more important in our context, he also fails utterly to follow through on his proclaimed severing of all attachments. Firmly tied to the Eurocentric worldview of the West, he is not, after all, the rootless Cynic cosmopolitan that he declares himself to be.

Two lessons emerge from Wright's failure here, on which I elaborate in the following section. The first lesson is that the position of a Cynic, rootless, and detached cosmopolitan is not only ethically problematic, but also highly impracticable. Human beings cannot, by sheer willpower, disconnect ourselves, our acting, our thinking, our feeling, from our historical situatedness--the historically conditioned character of our understanding. Such a step presupposes an autonomy of identity that we do not seem to have.

Wright's apparent failure further teaches, however, that his audacious declarations of rootlessness in Pagan Spain, and, partly, in White Man Listen!, while effectually radical for shocking the (US) public, do not comprise the limits of his actually existing cosmopolitanism. Rather, they might better be understood as part of his cosmopolitan process. While he was painfully aware of the complex entanglements that tied him to his historical situatedness, Wright was committed, in these texts and elsewhere, to the difficult endeavor of transcending these constraints, and used the most radical rhetoric to underline this commitment. Wright's statements declare his intention to pledge his primary allegiance to no government, religion, or racial community. That he did pledge his allegiance to a much greater community becomes clear when one reexamines the philosophical shift that occurs at the end of The Outsider.

In Cross Damon, Wright creates a hero who desperately tries to transcend his particular historical situation and racial boundaries in an existential search for identity. Regarding race as a social construct rather than a pre-determined essence, Damon not only violently confronts the normative power of a racialized US society; he also believes that he can exist as an outsider to society in general.

By making Damon's struggle for absolute autonomy a failure, however, Wright seems to argue that such autonomy is both inhuman and impossible. As is often observed, while Kierkegaardian dread characterizes the larger part of the novel, it is a decidedly humanistic version of existentialism that the novel acknowledges in the end, comparable to (and perhaps directly influenced by) Jean-Paul Sartre's position as he articulates it in Existentialism and Humanism (1945). (14) On the last pages of The Outsider, Wright has Cross Damon openly renounce his nihilism, realizing that he needs the recognition of others as well as solidarity with them to constitute a meaningful identity: "I wish I had something to give the meaning of my life to others.... To make a bridge from man to man.... Men hate themselves and it makes them hate others.... Man is all we've got.... I wanted to be free [but] the search can't be done alone.... Alone a man is nothing .... Man is a promise that he must never break" (Outsider 585). An excerpt from Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism reveals the parallels between Damon's final epiphany and Sartre's plea for a humanist existentialism:

   The man who becomes aware of himself through the cogito also
   perceives all others.... The other is indispensable to my own
   existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself.... We want
   freedom for freedom's sake and in every particular circumstance.
   But in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the
   freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours.
   (52)

According to Sartre, this intersubjectivity is what constitutes the humanism of existentialism. While each individual is free and therefore fully responsible for his or her actions, he or she is at the same time also dependent on the recognition of others and responsible for the consequences that chosen actions have for others. This realization is exactly the one that Damon makes at the end of his life: other humans matter, regardless of nation or race, and the building of a meaningful life cannot be accomplished alone. While The Outsider is, on the one hand, a novel about the very specific historical situation of the African American male in the mid-20th-century US, Wright made clear, on the other hand, that his hero "could be of any race," and, presumably, of any nationality (qtd. in Fabre 172). What Wright sought to depict was the problem of human existence as such.

Undoubtedly an African American novel, The Outsider is at the same time "an elaborate body of philosophically informed reflection on the character of western civilization and the place of racism within it," as Paul Gilroy puts it (Black Atlantic 154). Wright is, indeed, concerned with a problem, and with solidarity that transcends race as well as nation. Like Damon, Wright himself yearns for ties based on insight; bonds open to individuals of every ethnicity or nationality. In Black Power, Wright repeats a speech that he gave during one of Nkrumah's political rallies, in which he claimed that the specific "heritage" of African Americans "has brought us a sense of unity deeper than race, a sense of humanity that has made us sensitive to the sufferings of all mankind, that has made us increasingly human in a world that is rapidly losing its claim to humanity" (Black Power 84; emphasis mine). This yearning for solidarity with all human beings is at odds with Wright's proclaimed detachment from human bonds, the Cynic position; rather, springing from a specific heritage to embrace the universal, it fits precisely the definition for Stoic cosmopolitanism cited above.

It should not come as a surprise then, when Michel Fabre claims that Wright remained all of his life "very much a humanist" (The World of Richard Wright 159). Like Sartre, Wright believed in the importance of political commitment, which was expressed in their joint engagement in the Assemblymen Democratique Revolutionnaire (RDF), a radical left group that rejected both American capitalism and Soviet communism, and that was committed to finding a third (transnational) political way. (15) According to Fabre, while in France Wright developed three major preoccupations, which led, among other things, to his involvement in the RDF: "how to inject a personal philosophy into Marxist theory; how to restore morality to political action; and how to save mankind from ... destruction through the reactivation of humanistic values" (159). Indeed, all of his nonfiction books of the 1950s turn away from race relations in the US, and show concern instead about the future of the world in general and the situation of decolonization movements in particular. While his horizon widens to include now a transnational and transracial group of people whose members live all over the world, his sense of loyalty remains partial--it is with those who are the victims of oppression.

Stoic cosmopolitanism allows for such particular concerns, for "special loyalties to more specific communities" within the framework of world citizenship (Nussbaum 7) while also advocating universal allegiance to humanity. In spite of his repeated declarations to the contrary, Wright clearly always had such "special loyalties." The concrete object of his loyalty, however, shifted over time. While his earlier loyalty was to African Americans, the primary allegiance of his later years was to the global community of the oppressed. This shift was as much predicated on his specific historical situatedness as an African American as it was a result of his frequent and diverse encounters with the cultural "Other." In neither case, however, did these primary allegiances efface a deeper identification with an abstract idea of America, an idea inextricably tied to Enlightenment principles.

If one's historical situatedness is simply an accident of birth, as Martha Nussbaum claims (7), it is certainly a decisive one, and Wright dedicated much of his literary career to a minute examination of the injuries that result from the specific historical accident of being born black in 20th-century America. The Negro American," he writes in White Man Listen!, "is the only American in America who says 'I want to be an American.' More or less all the other Americans are bore Americans and take their Americanism for granted" (17). As a result of this paradoxical existence, Wright claims, the African American cannot help but become "a kind of negative American" (17). To be American in the US, he said in a 1947 interview, "means to be white, protestant [sic], and very rich. This excludes almost entirely black people and anyone else who can be easily identified" ("I Feel More at Home" 126-27). Apparently, Wright understood that despite such exclusion he never would--indeed, never could--entirely stop being American.

Americanism versus Cosmopolitanism?

Fabre claims that the question of Wright's "Americanness" is best addressed in an unpublished piece that he presumably wrote for a French audience, giving not one but 86 answers to the question, "Am I an American?" Every single answer starts with, "I am an American but ..." (The World 188), and Fabre suggests that the "but" is the most important point of these answers. However, given his speculation that the text was written in the late 1950s--which would mean either after or concurrently with both Pagan Spain and White Man Listen!, it is quite remarkable that Wright identified himself as an American at all, much less 86 times in a row. The American he presented himself as being, though, was an American with a twist:

      I am an American but tomorrow I could surrender my citizenship
   and still be an American....

      I am an American but not of today's America....

      I am an American but I can live without America and still be an
   American, which ought to--I feel--prove what an American is or ought
   to be. (qtd. in Fabre 188-89)

It would not be going too far to say that, when writing this speech, Wright seems still to have felt attached to "America." The idea or ideal that connected him emotionally to America was one he had grown up with and could not help but embrace, but it was also an idea that conflicted so brutally with his experiences that he had to leave the country to keep it alive. Only in a non-American framework could he experience freedom, equality, justice, and the rest. To be American, for Wright, was thus not to pledge allegiance to the American flag or to own an American passport (although he would learn painfully the significance of the latter); to be American meant to be thoroughly cosmopolitan. "I am that sort of American," he writes, "an amalgam of many races and many continents and cultures, [and] I feel that the real end and aim of being an American is to be able to live as a man anywhere," respecting "the sacredness that I feel resides in human personality" (Fabre 188f; emphasis mine). His assertion should not be confused with the oft-heard argument that America's melting-pot policy equals a micro-cosmopolitanism. (16) Wright does not claim that US society is even remotely cosmopolitan, nor does he imply that the US is in any position to "educate," "police," or otherwise colonize other countries. He is an American, he declares, but unlike many of his countrymen, he need "not use the ideals of my country as an excuse to ask you to give me access to the minerals or the strategic positions of your country" (Fabre 190).

Acutely aware of US realities, Wright does not, perhaps cannot, disconnect his cosmopolitan ideals from their perceived Americanness, not even in the late 1950s, after a decade of expatriation. "American" ideals, most of which he can only experience in a non-American framework, do not, for all that, stop being American for him. This is the tricky nature of historical situatedness: it cannot be fully renounced or left behind, because it shapes the way we see and think, and even the way we imagine a different way of seeing or thinking. This difference is why, as James T. Campbell has noted, "[i]nnumerable African American travelers in Africa have experienced ... moments of disillusionment, moments bringing them face-to-face with Africa's unfamiliarity and their own painful Americanness" (211).

Wrighting Intercultural Hermeneutics from the Perspective of Coloniality

In his 1960 Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), Hans-Georg Gadamer is concerned with the structures of (intercultural) understanding. Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudice in Truth and Method springs from a recognition of the inevitable historical situatedness of every human being--the historically conditioned character of understanding--coupled with the hermeneutic imperative that one must engage with this limitation. For Gadamer, the only way out of the prison of one's historically conditioned understanding lies in interaction with an Other. Only the fruitful interaction between the contexts of the Self and the Other, according to Gadamer, can produce new human understanding. To analyze the process of such understanding, Gadamer examines the etymology and half-hidden second meaning of "pre-judice"--in German, Vor-urteil--which he understands as a vorlaufiges Urteil, a pre-judgment. He argues that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices (or "pre-judgments') govern our ability to open up to "what is to be understood," in this case the cultural Other (or any Other that we try to understand, for that matter, including a historical text). Gadamer takes the Heideggerian notion of a prior hermeneutical situatedness and frames it in terms of the "fore-structures" of understanding. A prejudice (or pre-judgement), he explains, is an anticipatory structure that allows the Other to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. Not only are pre-judgments deriving from our own cultural-historical situatedness unavoidable, they are absolutely essential, in their roles as anticipatory structures, to our processes of understanding. Understanding, according to Gadamer, always involves an "anticipation of completeness": a continuously revisable presupposition of what is yet to be understood.

If prejudices are as vital to understanding as they are inevitable, the capacity to avoid getting stuck with a prejudice, but instead to treat it as a "continuously revisable" pre-judgment, is wholly dependent on what Gadamer calls "openness" or "goodwill." "Openness to the Other," he writes, "involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to" (Truth and Method 361). Without goodwill, there is no readiness to open up and revise previous pre-judgments into new pre-judgments. However, this disposition is how we function as understanding beings--by having our assumptions constantly challenged by other, new and differing information, without ever arriving at a fixed or final judgment.

Gadamer's reliance on goodwill for successful mediation and understanding is mirrored in an important passage in White Man Listen!: "[I]f good will is lacking," Wright asserts, "everything is lost and a dialogue between men becomes not only useless, but dangerous, and sometimes even incriminating" (47). Wright not only shares with Gadamer an insistence on the importance of goodwill, but also joins him in the conviction of the utter impossibility of an objective, eternally true standpoint: "Obviously no striving for an objectivity of attitude is ever complete. Tomorrow, or the day after, someone will discover some fact, some element, or a nuance that I've forgotten to take into account, and, accordingly, my attitude will have to be revised, discarded, or extended, as the case may be" (White Man, Listen! 48). Our attitudes, or our preliminary judgments, to invoke Gadamer's terminology, must be constantly revised, Wright claims, because as human beings we are inevitably "the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions; and the most that our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstances into account? That is what I am attempting to do. More than that no reasonable man of good will can demand" (White Man, Listen! 48).

Wright and Gadamer's trust in the power of open-minded interaction to help individuals take their own circumstances into account, however, was and is by no means shared by everyone. After the initial publication of Truth and Method, Gadamer was widely criticized for his "naive" reliance on goodwill and the possibility of (interpersonal as well as intercultural) understanding, most famously by Jacques Derrida. (17) Conversely, throughout all his public debate with Derrida, Gadamer never lost confidence in the beneficial effects of interactions with the Other. Against Derrida's insistence on the totality of otherness, Gadamer maintained that interaction with the Other, even if it remains incomprehensible to some degree, is central to human understanding: "To allow the Other to be valid against oneself ... is not only to recognize in principle the limitation of one's own framework, but is also to allow one to go beyond one's own possibilities, precisely in a dialogical, communicative, hermeneutic process" ("Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity" 284). Trying to understand the Other, Gadamer suggests, is not only important for intercultural or interpersonal understanding. It is crucial for self-understanding as well. Real self-understanding, he maintains, even requires the "strengthening of the Other against me" (285).

If taken seriously, such a definition of understanding has rather serious implications for the cosmopolitan endeavor. Gadamer argues effectively for not only accepting or tolerating the Other, but for giving the benefit of the doubt, assuming from the start of a conversation that indeed the Other could well be right. Without the challenges offered us by our Others, he claims, we cannot see as constructed what we have learned to see as natural. Only the Other can save us from eternal confinement in the narrow little box that we believe to be the world. (18) In one of Black Power's most revealing passages, Wright shows how this important process works:

   And suddenly I was self-conscious; I began to question myself, my
   assumptions, I was assuming that these people had to be pulled out
   of this life, out of these conditions of poverty, had to become
   literate and eventually industrialized. But why? Was not the desire
   for that mostly on my part rather than theirs? I was literate,
   Western, disinherited, and industrialized and I felt each day the
   pain and anxiety of it. Why then must I advocate the dragging of
   these people into my trap? (Black Power 163)

Wright's moment of doubt reveals the important flipside of an honest and goodwill-driven engagement with new contexts and cultural realms: the interrogation and renegotiation of where one comes from.

This is why African cultural theorist Manthia Diawara calls Black Power a "magnificent book." In spite of all the problems that the travelogue manifests, Diawara is deeply impressed by Wright's vulnerable self-exposure of his conflicting emotions of "identification and estrangement, love and hate" toward Africans as well as toward his own background (In Search of Africa 72). (19) Wright himself exposes these conflicting emotions again, in another passage in Black Power:

   The American Negro's passionate identification with America stem[s]
   from two considerations: first, it was a natural part of his
   assimilation of Americanism; second, so long had Africa been
   described as something shameful, barbaric, a land in which one went
   about naked, a land in which his ancestors had sold their kith and
   kin as slaves--so long had he heard all this that he wanted to
   disassociate himself in his mind from all such realities. (73)

Wright was not able to transcend these Western prejudices about Africa, but he was aware that his biases were culturally conditioned. The constant interrogation of currently held prejudices, through (often painful) self-awareness, offers the cosmopolitan the chance not only to better understand the cultural Other, but also to question and resist the societal forces that form her. As Paul Gilroy puts it in Against Race (2000), the uses of cosmopolitanism seem to lie in seeing "how an understanding of one's own particularity or identity might be transformed as a result of a principled exposure to the claims of otherness" (115). Thus, Mignolo and other contemporary theorists have emphasized the importance of the Other's voice in one's conceiving of a cosmopolitanism that can go beyond Western benevolence within the framework of coloniality.

From "Critical" Cosmopolitanism to Cosmopolitanism in Process

Wright's and Gadamer's shared emphasis on the importance of good-willed conversation and critical self-examination do indeed resonate with Mignolo's demands for a critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism. "Critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism as a regulative principle," Mignolo writes, "demands yielding generously ('convivially' said Vitoria; 'friendly' said Kant) to diversity as a universal and cosmopolitan project in which everyone participates instead of 'being participated'" (Mignolo 747). To the happy list of "generously," "convivially," and "friendly," one could easily add Gadamer's and Wright's "good-willed." All of these statements, from Wright to Mignolo, sound in turn remarkably like that of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in his Meditations: "Accustom yourself not to be inattentive to what another person says, and as far as possible enter into that person's mind.... Generally, one must first learn many things before one can judge another's action with understanding" (qtd. in Nussbaum 10). What should make Wright more interesting for Mignolo's project than Marcus Aurelius is that, as an African American, he is indeed writing from the perspective of coloniality. Only this viewpoint, Mignolo has claimed, can develop a cosmopolitanism that will not get caught--willingly or unwillingly--in the trap of perpetual Eurocentricity.

Wright himself would certainly have agreed. After all, he writes of himself as "ahead of the West," as a result of the fact that, while being a Westerner himself, his stance "conflicts at several vital points with the present, dominant outlook of the West" (White Man, Listen! 55). Consequently, his rejection in Black Power of a "racial explanation" for his being in Africa need not lead, as Appiah has insisted, to a "paranoid hermeneutics." One could argue instead with S. Shankar that Wright introduces a third position into the discussion. Instead of wholly identifying with either "(black) race" or "(Western) culture," Wright prefers to act in the arena of transnational and transracial politics" (S. Shankar 15). Such a move is made possible only because of Wright's anti-essentialist stance on race. Among African Americans, as Paul Gilroy has noted, Wright was among those thinkers "prepared to renounce the claims of African American exceptionalism in favor of a global, coalitional politics in which anti-imperialism and anti-racism might be seen to interact if not to fuse" (Against Race 225). Besides involving himself in the Pan-Africanist movement, Wright joined with the communist party and with Sartre and other French intellectuals to "cross the color line" in allegiance with the right political cause.

Wright's mindset as well as his choice of territorial exile, then, should be understood as the first step to transcending diasporic thinking. Wright's notion of black modernity was, as Kevin Gaines expresses in American Africans in Ghana (2006), "a forward-looking concept," at odds not only with an Africa figuring as ancestral homeland, but also with the racial mystique of Negritude (56). That Wright never succeeded in becoming an ideal cosmopolitan, however, could at first glance be understood to support the claims of those conservative critics who insist that we cannot get by without a firm grounding in family, religion, and nation, and that we must perish if we try to do without. After all, Wright was estranged from his family as well as from most of his former friends and compatriots when he died alone in his Paris apartment, on November 28, 1960. (20)

Wright's shifting system of allegiances points toward a man who did--to at least some extent--"get by" without many of the defining identifications that conservative critics claim humans need, such as family, religion, and nation. These affiliations are taken for granted by many, and theorized as essential for feeling "at home in the world," but are not so straight-forwardly available to those who, like Wright, embody Mignolo's notion of border-thinking. In his ever-expanding horizon and rejection of conservative loci of security, Wright lived out what I have termed the ideal of cosmopolitanism in process. Such a process involves moments of both Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism, and also moments of aborted engagement with the Other--cosmopolitan failures. Wright's life illustrates the difficulty of transcending one's historical situatedness and the set of prejudices that come along with it, the best of intentions notwithstanding. This is the inevitable dilemma of the "in-process" cosmopolitan. What matters most, though, are Wright's efforts to fulfill a cosmopolitan ideal. As he said once to a young woman who asked him if his ideas and ideals would be suited to make people happy, "My dear, I do not deal in happiness; I deal in meaning" (White Man, Listen! xxix).

Works Cited

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "A Long Way From Home: Wright in the Gold Coast." Richard Wright. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 173-90.

--. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006.

Baldwin, James. "Alas, Poor Richard." Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial P, 1961. 181-215.

Barber, Benjamin. "Constitutional Faith." Nussbaum 30-37.

Beck, Ulrich. "The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach." Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004): 430-49.

Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Campbell, James T. Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Calhoun, Craig J. "The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism." Debating Cosmopolitics. Ed. Daniele Archibugi. London: Verso, 2003. 86-116.

Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Feeling and Thinking beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.

Chiwengo, Ngwarsungu "Gazing Through the Screen: Richard Wright's Africa." Smith 20-44.

Code, Lorraine, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. New York: Dover, 1990.

Dean, Jodi. Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. "Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer." Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Eds. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer. Albany: SUNY P, 1989. 52-54.

Diawara, Manthia. In Search of Africa. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

--. We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003

Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. "On the Problem of Self-Understanding." Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and ed. David E. Linge. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. 44-58.

--. "Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity: Subject and Person" Continental Philosophy Review 33.3 (2000): 284-86.

--. Truth and Method. 1960. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Gaines, Kevin K. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.

--. "Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana: Black Radicalism and the Dialectics of Diaspora." Social Text 19.2 (2001): 75-101.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

--. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Held, David. Democracy and Global Order: From the Nation-state to Cosmopolitanism Governance. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995.

Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. 1795. Trans. M Campbell. New York: Garland, 1972.

Kleingeld, Pauline, and Eric Brown. "Cosmopolitanism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dec. 12 2005. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/.>

Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969.

McConnell, Michael. "Don't Neglect the Little Platoons." Nussbaum 78-84.

Mignolo, Walter "The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism" Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 721-45.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Nussbaum, Martha, ed. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston: Beacon P, 1996.

Posnock, Ross. "The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism." American Literary History 12.4 (2002): 802-18.

Robbins, Bruce. "Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism." Cheah and Robbins 1-19.

Rowley, Hazel. "The 'Exile' Years? How the '50s Culture Wars Destroyed Richard Wright." BookForum: The Review for Art, Fiction & Culture 12.4 (2006): 15-18.

--. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism. 1945. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.

Shankar, S. "Richard Wright's Black Power. Colonial Politics and the Travel Narrative." Smith 3-19.

Smith, Virginia Whatley, ed. Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.

Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Tate, Claudia. "Christian Existentialism in The Outsider." CLA Journal 25 (1982): 371-95.

Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. 1954. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995.

--. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. 1956. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.

--. "I Feel More at Home in France than Where I Was Born." 1947. Conversations with Richard Wright. Eds. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Trans. Michel Fabre. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 126-27.

--. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.

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Notes

(1.) For the "in-process" terminology I use to denote cosmopolitanism I advocate here, I am indebted to Dean and Mohanty, who both develop the notion of an "in-process understanding" of solidarity.

(2.) "Practice" is not understood here in the Marxist sense of revolutionary change, but as the alternative to the teleological. My use of the term roughly parallels that of Posnock and Mignolo.

(3.) Kleingeld and Brown explain: "By identifying himself not as a citizen of Sinope but as a citizen of the world, Diogenes was refusing to agree that he owed special service to Sinope and the Sinopeans. So understood, 'I am a citizen of the cosmos' is a negative claim, and we might wonder if there is any positive content to the Cynic's world-citizenship."

(4.) The current work of Robbins, Cheah, Mignolo, Posnock, Calhoun, Appiah, Gilroy, and Held, among others, explores such perspectives, and these theorists offer a range of convincing explanations of why we should concern ourselves with redefinitions of cosmopolitanism in a world characterized by the geopolitical shift of globalization or global capitalism. Unsurprisingly, such redefinitions come with a myriad of modifiers, such as realistic cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitan realism (Beck), critical cosmopolitanism/dialogical cosmopolitanism (Mignolo), rooted cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitan patriotism/partial cosmopolitanism (Appiah), actually existing cosmopolitanism (Robbins), radical cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitics (Cheah), post-identity cosmopolitanism (Posnock).

(5.) Mignolo frames his essay with the claim that coloniality "is the hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility." For this reason, he examines cosmopolitanism "within the scope of the modern/colonial world--that is, located chronologically in the 1500s and spatially in the northwest Mediterranean and the North Atlantic." That this "hidden dark face of modernity" that is coloniality "remains difficult to understand as the darker side of modernity," Mignolo argues, "is due to the fact that most stories of modernity have been told from the perspective of modernity itself, including, of course, those told by its internal critics." In consequence, Mignolo sees a need for a re-conception of "cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality" (722).

(6.) Mignolo reads the term global designs as global narratives with a "managerial" orientation: "Narratives of cosmopolitan orientation could be either managerial (what I call global designs--as in Christianity, 19th-century imperialism, or late-20th-century neoliberal globalization) or emancipatory (what I call cosmopolitanism--as in Vitoria, Kant, or Karl Marx, leaving aside the differences in each of these projects), even if they are oblivious to the saying of the people that are supposed to be emancipated. The need for a critical cosmopolitanism arises from the shortcomings of both" (722).

(7.) Wright's estrangement from the US public in general and from African American communities in particular have recently been read anew; see Rowley, "The 'Exile' Years?" Rowley maintains: "It was one thing to hail Wright as a talented black son in his own house, but Americans did not expect this black man to stride out through the front door. The black community tended to regard Wright as a deserter" (15). Stovall similarly asserts that "in criticizing America from Paris, Wright had crossed the Rubicon" (221).

(8.) Baldwin's term, taken from the title of an article he wrote for Esquire in July 1961 (215).

(9.) As James Campbell, Rowley, and others have shown, another problem was that in the increasingly paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy years, Wright, like many other black intellectuals in the Paris expatriate community (among them William Gardner Smith and Richard Gibson) was suspected of spying for the US government. James Campbell cites a letter that Kay Boyle wrote to Wright in 1956, warning him "that you are known to be working with the State Department, or the FBI, ... and that you give information about other Americans in order to keep your passport and be able to travel" (James Campbell 197). This accusation seems to have been not quite as outrageously wrong as one might assume at first: Campbell quotes from US Embassy memos that show clearly that Wright, while almost certainly never on a government payroll, did indeed give somewhat denunciatory information to the American consul in Paris, Agnes Schneider, to secure his passport (Campbell 102, 191-92).

(10.) I am grateful to Edwards for clarifying his understanding of diaspora in a private e-mail conversation on October 2, 2006.

(11.) Critical distinctions between the first two books and the existentialist third date back to Margolies (113-14).

(12.) See Chiwengo and also Shankar. Moreover, Fabre wrote on the relationship between the two books much earlier The World of Richard Wright. Fabre's bibliographical "Wright's First Hundred Books," in The World of Richard Wright, cites Wright's familiarity with Conrad's books and his ownership of most of them (20).

(13.) Passages in both Heart of Darkness and Black Power depict Africans in exotic and dehumanizing terms; Conrad draws Africans as bestial and savage, and, in a more mid-20th-century idiom, Wright describes African men as robot-like and only half-human. For both authors, "the Africans" are submissive and indifferent; they go about their difficult labor without resistance and pay no or almost no attention to the (non-African) observer. Interestingly, the respective narrators of Heart of Darkness and Black Power express a certain shuddering compassion mixed with disapproval for the African men they observe.

(14.) For one particularly cogent example, see Tate.

(15.) Sartre in turn made Wright one of the prime examples of a politically committed writer in his What is Literature? (1948).

(16.) This argument can be found, for example, in Barber and also in McConnell.

(17.) Derrida not only doubted the effectiveness of Gadamer's goodwill; he rejected the possibility of intersubjective understanding wholesale. In "Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer" (1981), he follows Nietzsche in insisting that the Other is absolutely and incomprehensibly alien, and that interpretation of this Otherness is never an understanding mediation, but "the translation of what is alien into one's self" (53), and therefore appropriation, a "saming" of the Other. Derrida conceptualizes understanding as a necessarily subsuming, colonizing, and imperial project easily linked to the Eurocentric cosmopolitan tradition that Mignolo sees epitomized in the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolome de Las Casas and Immanuel Kant (Mignolo 727).

(18.) While Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics does provide valuable tools for the practice of cosmopolitanism, he has been reasonably excluded from virtually all current debates on the topic. Even if we reject Derrida's sweeping critique, we need to come to terms with the problems posed by Gadamer's Eurocentric outlook as well as by the prominence of tradition in his work and his almost complete silence about women and other Others. Looking with Gadamer at Gadamer, his own perspective must be seen as an inevitably limited and historically situated one, one that can be only improved and widened by a conversation that allows engagement with a different perspective. The rare feminist and intercultural criticisms of Gadamer's work demonstrate effective use of Gadamer's concepts without accepting his conservative philosophical outlook wholesale. In her provocatively titled "Why Feminists Do Not Read Gadamer"--the introduction to a collection of 16 essays of feminists who do read Gadamer--Code compares appropriations of Gadamerian thought in feminist theory to those of Nietzsche's work. "Gadamerian hermeneutics," she claims, "in which knowing is engaged, situated, dialogic, and historically conscious--has so much to offer to feminists and other theorists of subjectivity, agency, history, and knowledge who are disillusioned with an empiricist-positivist legacy that manifests itself in epistemologies of domination" (4). Gadamer's hermeneutic interpretive conversation, Code suggests, is valuable because it "enables recognition of the other and cognizance of the situatedness of human life and knowledge," making us aware of the conflict that emerges "between hermeneutic requirements for openness and the limitations imposed by situatedness" (21). Code's view is shared by other feminists, including Linda Alcoff, who goes as far as to claim that some of Gadamer's central positions "are nascently feminist," regardless of his own beliefs (Code 232).

(19.) Diawara, a Malian expatriate in the US, executed in many ways the inverse of Wright's journey, and has expressed cogently the dilemma of the would-be cosmopolitan. "I wonder if I have become the cosmopolitan individual of my dreams, or if I am still trapped in a racial or ethnic group," he writes in We Won't Budge.

(20.) Rowley's "The 'Exile' Years?" also sheds new light on Wright's increasing estrangement from the black expatriate community in Paris, and the mysterious circumstances of his death.

Alexa Weik is a PhD candidate in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego.