The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and Richard Wright: Theorizing the African Diaspora

Abstract

Confronted with the task of defining what it meant to be black in an anti-black world, early cultural critics faced intellectual, existential, and political challenges. This paper focuses on how Paul Robeson and Richard Wright met these challenges in the post-World War Two period. The author explores the way that Robeson and Wright’s biographies and writings shed light on the ambiguities inherent in theorizing the African Diaspora.