The Cold War on Race and Culture

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  • 人種と文化をめぐる冷戦
  • 人種と文化をめぐる冷戦 : 第一回黒人作家芸術家会議のリチャード・ライトとジョージ・ラミングを中心に
  • ジンシュ ト ブンカ オ メグル レイセン : ダイイチカイ コクジン サッカ ゲイジュツカ カイギ ノ リチャード ・ ライト ト ジョージ ・ ラミング オ チュウシン ニ
  • Richard Wright, George Lamming, and the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris
  • 第一回黒人作家芸術家会議のリチャード・ライトとジョー ジ・ラミングを中心に

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Abstract

This paper examines the political significance of covert animosities behind the celebratory atmosphere of interracial solidarity among French-speaking, English-speaking writers and intellectuals at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, one of the crucial moments of the Third Worldism. The major focus of this article is dedicated to the analysis of the papers delivered by the black American author Richard Wright (“Tradition and Industrialization”) and the Barbadian novelist George Lamming (“The Negro Writer and His World”), including a report on the conference by James Baldwin, the then young African American author at his sojourn in Paris. I argue that in the context of the rising anti-communism inside and outside the U.S. soil, the problematization of racism and colonialism that were on agenda for most of the French speaking African and Caribbean, was differently dealt with by Anglophone authors. First, the historical and political context of the early cold war era is offered. Second, I examine how Richard Wright, due to his tendency to psychologize the people in the colonial and ex-colonial regions, touched upon crucial issues such as racism and colonialism, but immediately passed them onto a comparatively urgent reality of economic and technological modernization. Third, I argue that George Lamming, through his philosophical adumbration on the affectivity of shame, points at the realm that cannot be grasped by a schematized, if not wholly paternalistic, understanding toward the ex-colonized peoples, and thus offers an enduring critique toward the difficulty and possibility of the interracial solidarity per se.

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