SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “‘Last Call to the West’: Richard Wright's The Color Curtain.” In South Atlantic Review 59, no. 4 (November 1994): 77-88.

In the following essay, Folks asserts that Wright's The Color Curtain includes insight on the relationship between the Western and non-Western worlds.

As the record of Richard Wright's travel to Indonesia in 1955 to attend the Bandung Conference of African and Asian nations, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956) reveals Richard Wright's effort to understand his own identity in relation to non-Western cultures. In his capacity as a free-lance observer rather than delegate, Wright was perhaps more independent ideologically than others, although his indirect State Department funding (through the Congress for Cultural Freedom) without Wright's knowledge “was actually financed in part by the CIA” (Cobb 233). Without overestimating Wright's understanding of his non-Western subject (James Baldwin charges: “[Wright's] notions of society, politics, and history … seemed to...