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Richard Wright, Bandung, and the Poetics of the Third World

Part of: Into the Stacks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2018

Mark Philip Bradley
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Extract

“Do you think that whenever I'm talking to someone I'm conscious of whether or not he is ‘white’ or ‘colored’? … I was born a ‘native,’ and I've lived with racial discrimination. But we are free now. I'm no longer a ‘native’ but an Indonesian…. I don't feel inferior to whites, and I don't hate them either,” Sitor Situmorang, a preeminent Indonesian poet and essayist, told African American writer Richard Wright at an April 1955 social gathering in Wright's honor. Growing more agitated, Situmorang raised his voice and continued, “We are against colonialism, but we are not against whites. We struggled for racial equality, not for the belief in another superrace, a colored superrace.”

Keywords

Post-1945Cold WarAfrican AmericanForeign RelationsHistoriography
Type
Into the Stacks
Information
Modern American History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 147 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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References

1 Vuyk, Beb, “A Weekend with Richard Wright,” in Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference, eds. Roberts, Brian Russell and Foulcher, Keith (Durham, NC, 2016), 201, 202Google Scholar.

2 Wright, Richard, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956) reprinted in Black Power: Three Books from Exile (New York, 2008), 440, 438Google Scholar.

3 Espiritu, Augusto, “‘To Carry Water on Both Shoulders’: Carlos P. Romulo, American Empire and the Meanings of Bandung,” Radical History Review 95 (2006): 173–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Prasad, Vijay, The Darker Races: A People's History of the Third World (New York, 2007), 31–50Google Scholar; and Young, Robert J. C., “Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the Tricontinental,” Historein 5 (2005): 11–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The origins of the “Third World” as a descriptor and a political project are often ascribed to Alfred Sauvy's “Trois mondes, une planète” in the L'Observateur (August 14, 1952), but more broadly it represented a concern with North–South issues of non-alignment and economic development after high imperialism outside the post-1945 Cold War East–West struggle. On the fraught history of the concept itself, see Pletsch, Carl E., “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (October 1981): 565–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Solarz, Marcin Wojciech, “‘Third World’: The 60th Anniversary of a Concept that Changed History,” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 9 (2012): 1561–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, UK, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Connelly, Matthew, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,” American History Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 739–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for instance, Byrne, Jeffrey James, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order (New York, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brazinsky, Gregg A., Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry During the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chamberlin, Paul Thomas, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Irwin, Ryan, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Parker, Jason C., Hearts, Mind, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (New York, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY, 2013)Google Scholar. See also von Eschen, Penny, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997)Google Scholar.

8 See, for instance, Daulatzai, Sohail, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovelace, H. Timothy Jr., “William Worthy's Passport: Travel Restriction and the Cold War Struggle for Civil and Human Rights,” Journal of American History 103, no. 1 (June 2016): 107–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Malloy, Sean L., Out of Oakland: Black Panther Internationalism during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slate, Nico, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA, 2011)Google Scholar; and Young, Cynthia B., Soul Power: Cultural, Radicalism, and the Making of the U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Vuyk, “A Weekend with Richard Wright,” 202.

10 Roberts and Foulcher, Indonesian Notebook, 12, 168, 202, 78.

11 Ibid., 146.

12 Ibid., 17–18.

13 Burton, Antoinette, “The Solidarities of Bandung: Toward a Critical History of 21st-Century History,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Lee, Christopher (Athens, OH, 2010), 353Google Scholar.