Towards a Cosmopolitan Community: Richard Wright’s Black Power
Towards a Cosmopolitan Community: Richard Wright’s Black Power

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes an investigation into the identity of ethnic minorities on the background of the majority. More specifically, the paper aims at analysing a search for, and (self-) representation of, African-American identity against the African and American backgrounds, as illustrated by Richard Wright’s travelogue Black Power (1954). In offering a close reading of Wright’s African travelogue and highlighting its rhetoric of distance, the paper finds that it is by means of travel that Wright eventually attains a sense of belonging to a community, though not a geographic or ethnic one. This sense of belonging is enabled by Wright’s identification with what he describes as the “tragic elite” of the Third World, a (dis)community of ideological exiles made available to him through travel and which becomes the mirror image of his own identity as formed and expressed in Black Power and subsequent works.

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