Chapter 5, Without the Consolation of Tears, Richard Wright, France and the Ambivalence of Community Summary and Analysis

Richard Wright was the first black writer that the world literature establishment promoted as one of their own. His prominence opened the door to many young black writers to build their own careers. Wright's initial interest in the liberation of African-Americans was broadened into a larger anti-colonialism. He fought for an anti-imperialist, anti-racist politics. Wright, unlike Du Bois, did not believe in social perfection. He saw the Negro as "America's metaphor," or a socially constructed symbol of racial slavery, but this symbol did not represent any fixed cultural or biological feature of blacks. This view represents anti-essentialism which often confuses Wright's critics as he distinguished between the social and the racial.

Wright's ideas developed as...