Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau

Abstract

Prologue: The Wright Stuff? Before Richard Wright sat the Third World of theory. It’s a Friday evening, 21 September 1956, the occasion of the First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne’s Amphitheâtre Descartes in Paris, now in its third day. In the audience is Aime Cesaire, Cheikh-Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Alexis, and Leopold-Sedar Senghor, just to begin a long and glorious roll call. With the conspicuous exception of W. E. B. DuBois, who was denied a passport by the U.S. State Department, here is assembled practically everymajor black critical thinker of the age.Here are the authors of Third World liberation, world-historic theorists of colonial resistance, forging new ideologies, new analyses, new “weapons of theory” out of negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis, African communalism, you name it; remember, it’s 1956, and these are the heady days of grand theory for the black world. Never had the promise of a genuine politics of culture seemedmore real, more realizable. And before them stands Richard Wright. Two years shy of his fiftieth birthday, he’s bespectacled, wearing a three-piece suit, white shirt, hair close-cropped; the photograph’s a little fuzzy, but it’s easy to make out the familiar visages of postcolonial iconography. His presence, and his lecture, had been eagerly awaited.