Page 67 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

him to move in an anti-imperialist direction. Garveyite anti-imperialism
was expressed in the well-known slogan ‘Africa for the Africans, at Home
and Abroad’ which all the Great Powers regarded as subversive and
which brought him and his followers into direct confrontation with
imperialist forces, at home and abroad.
Given only the vague grasp of the significance of imperialism, it is
difficult for Gilroy to give a coherent account of the work of either DuBois
or Richard Wright. For it is obvious that both are products of a different era
from that of Delany. Theirs is not the mid-Victorian period of bourgeois
liberalism, optimism and Free Trade during which the Civil War was
fought and emancipation from slavery won. Nor is it the period of Black
Reconstruction which followed. DuBois and Wright are products of the
collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of the robber barons, the deracination
of the rural black population in the South and the mass migration to
Northern cities. This is one and the same process which leads to the Italian
migrations to America, to the McKinley Tariff, to the Homestead Strike, to
the ‘big stick’ policy of Theodore Roosevelt, to the Spanish-American War,
the entry of the United States into World War I and the emergence of
America as an imperial Great Power at Versailles in 1919. DuBois analyses
this process sociologically and politically, Wright depicts it in his novels.
Wright is the chronicler of the saga of the deracinated black peasant
from Mississippi who flees Jim Crow in the South only to encounter the
all-powerful racism of the North. Wright understands well the experience
of deracination and presents fierce and powerful characterizations of the
inner rage which it produces in its black victims. But Wright does not
understand the emergence of a different kind of black person out of this
capitalist cauldron. This is a person driven not by ressentiment – by bitter-
ness and rage springing from the experience of seeing the entire social
and personal basis of their life destroyed while being powerless to do
anything much about it. This newer consciousness was to be found in the
black person who is rooted in Northern industrial society and who is
located at the heart of the very process of capitalist production – in some
of its most important industrial enterprises. Such a black person is driven
not by rage at what has been lost but by hope for what can be. The per-
sonal and social psychology is different and is generally not to be found
in Wright’s works.
It is in this sense that Wright’s artistic power can be said to have
declined when he went to live in Paris. Wright’s dilemma derived not
simply from being an American in Paris but was more specific, as Arna
Bontemps long ago pointed out. 51 Bontemps made the telling point that
Wright’s alienation derived from being rooted in the poverty and racial

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