Non, nous ne jouons pas la trompette: Richard Wright in Paris

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes , La Tristesse de Saint‐Louis: Jazz Under the Nazis (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1985). Boris Vian, Jazz et Cinéma (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1991). Petrine Archer Straw, Negrophilia (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000). , Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). , From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France: 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). The contemporary debate on universalism in cultural criticism is too voluminous to repeat here. For a survey of this debate as well as the historical trajectory of universalism in French culture from 1789 to the present, see Chapter One in , Paris, Race and Universalism in the Black Atlantic: Léopold Sédar Senghor, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Richard Wright. (Diss. Yale University, 2003. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003). For the argument specifically in favor of universalism's revolutionary, emancipatory potential, see , Masses, Classes, Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1994), Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Naomi Schor, “French Feminism is a Universality,” Bad Objects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). “Bitter Exile,” Works in Progress Talk (Yale University, 28 March 2001) 1. According to Patricia Willis, the American Literature curator at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, which holds the Richard Wright papers, Ellen Wright did not detail her reasons for closing Island of Hallucinations to the public. The sensitive reader might surmise that Wright's widow took action in part because the novel presents unflattering portraits of James Baldwin, Ollie Harrington, William Gardner Smith and other members of the African American exile community, whom it indicts for red‐baiting and counterespionage. With the character named Mechanical, a suicidal, drug‐addicted traitor, the novel offers an especially vicious portrait of homosexuality as a form of pathology. Hazel Rowley's biography explains that the Wrights' marriage was on shaky ground during the 1950s, involving periods of separation and extramarital affairs on both sides, which might have also contributed to Ellen Wright's decision to close Island to the public and preserve her privacy following her husband's untimely death. Louis Terrenoire, the French minister of information, supported the banning of Godard's film, arguing that it discouraged the French soldiers who had been drafted for service in Algeria. See , La Gangrène et l'oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 1998) 39. Alain Resnais's Muriel was censored in March 1959, René Vautier's Afrique 50 and Algérie en flammes, both filmed in 1957, were censored, Jacques Panijel's Octobre à Paris was censored in 1961, along with Resnais's Les Statues meurent aussi and Paul Carpita's Rendez‐vous des quais. Carpita's film, a simple love story set against the Marseille dock workers' strike and the war in Indochina, was accused of threatening public order (“contient des scènes de résistance violente à la force publique…présente une menace pour l'ordre public”) by the minister of industry and commerce. Stora argues that the censorship of the Carpita film in particular would cast a chill over film production and book publishing in the late 1950s and early 60s, resulting in distinct modes of auto‐censorship (La Gangrène et l'oubli, 39–40). For the mystical properties of therapeutic blackness in twentieth‐century French and francophone culture, see , Paris, Race and Universalism in the Black Atlantic. In 1957 he would write to Margrit de Sablonière, a friend in the Netherlands, that “France is sinking each day, each hour. We may have a dictatorship here before the year is over […] Poor mankind.” Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ) 458. For more on Wright's interest in French West Africa and its cultural differences from Anglophone Africa, see Virginia Whatley Smith, Richard Wright's Travel Writings (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001.) Whatley Smith argues that “Africa” as a theme enters Wright's writing as early as 1938 and quotes from Wright's outline for the trip, which included the headings “Europe in Africa's Mind” and “Africa in Europe's Mind” (207). Senegal was to figure prominently in Wright's travel writing, and he had begun preliminary research with French West Africans in Paris about their feelings toward French colonial rule (208). She asserts that he was worried about “irrationalism” and “primitivism” hindering French West Africa's struggle toward independence and modernism (192). One wonders if his contact with Senghor, whose religiosity Wright found irritating, was the source of this concern. Whatley Smith also takes the French West Africa project more specifically, and the emphasis on “Africa” in Wright's work more generally, as a “marker signifying the growth of the author's mind from the narrow space of his American birth to his universal place as a self‐appointed Pan‐Africanist and, more importantly, a ‘Western Man of Color’ and global humanist” (214).