Laila Amine, REI Fellow (2021-2022), will be giving a virtual talk on Friday, Sept. 23, 12:00 PM. The talk is title “‘I was looking at myself’: Richard Wright’s Return to West Africa.” To register for this event follow this link.
More information about the talk:
In summer of 1953, Richard Wright traveled to the Gold Coast to report on its bid for independence from Britain. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, one of the author’s first forays into surging anticolonial struggles, was not well received by postcolonial critics. Against charges that Wright’s diasporic connection only marshals a rhetoric of distance and difference, Amine argues in this virtual Friday Lunch talk that his return as “the long lost son of Africa” is mediated by another metaphoric return to his Southern roots and its enduring legacies of slavery, one that also produces solidarity amongst the “Wretched of the Earth.”