The Politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on Resistance is a valuable collection of essays on the work of the renowned novelist Richard Wright. The volume’s editors, Jane Anna Gordon and Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, have usefully arranged the 20 entries into 5 sections. In the first, Radical Politics, Lewis Gordon, Cedric J. Robinson, Zirakzadeh, and Marilyn Nissim-Sabat discuss the radical spirit of Wright’s political thought and include famous discussions of his engagement with Marxism. It is led off by Richard Wright’s “I Have Seen Black Hands.” In the second section, Sexuality and Gender, Floyd W. Hayes III, Paul Gilroy, and Tommy J. Curry deal with Wright’s well-known explorations into the difficulties of establishing healthy human connections across gender differences. Wright’s own “Behind the McGee Case” leads off the third section Black Internationalism, which contains essays by Lori J. Marso, Kevin Kelly Gaines, and Dorothy Stringer. In the fourth section Rhetorical Registers, William Dow, Perry S. Moskowitz, and James B. Haile III investigate Wright’s experimentation with literary modes and the way they might have influenced his political thought. It is introduced by Richard Wright’s “Blue Print for Negro Writing.” Wright’s “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite” leads off the fifth section, Uncle Tom’s Great-Grandchildren, which considers the lessons we might learn about contemporary forms of resistance from his work. It contains useful essays by Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, Laura Grattan, and Jane Anna Gordon. The editors also provide an informative introduction describing the important experiences in Wright’s early life that shaped his literary work and helped form his political and philosophical outlook and insights; they also discuss his association in France with intellectuals and influential anticolonial thinkers such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and George and Dorothy Padmore.

Given the sophistication of the contributions to this volume, it is not an introduction to Wright’s work and would not be a suitable text for a beginning course in African American philosophy or literature. The essays assume a considerable familiarity with Wright’s novels, short stories, and poetry, as well as a more than passing acquaintance with Marxist theory; many to different degrees also employ the vocabulary of Continental philosophy and literary theory. Some of this is to be expected because, despite the lucidity of his own prose, Wright was deeply influenced by Marx and became closely associated with famous existential philosophers when he moved to France. However, some of the authors make little effort to help readers participate in some small way in their investigations, rather than stand outside them as admiring onlookers. Vainly did I search for passages beginning with “It may be objected…” that more accommodating analytic philosophers employ to include the reader in the investigations that they are conducting. This is ironic given Wright’s famous warning of the evils of being an “outsider,” but it is more importantly a pity because many of those essays succeed in making interesting and useful points.

Happily, most of the work in the collection is lucid and inviting while also being sophisticated and intellectually rewarding. Outstanding in these respects is the essay, “Alternative Readings of Bigger Thomas” by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh. In 20 pages he provides an insightful interpretation of three famous, influential, and contrasting commentaries on Wright’s Native Son that were published in the 1950s and 1960s: those of Irving Howe, of Ralph Ellison, and of James Baldwin. Interestingly he shows that these thinkers understood the political and philosophical implications of Bigger Thomas in ways that differed from each other and from the way Wright himself understood his own creation. And then, reflecting on these conclusions, Zirakzadeh suggests that contemporary readers may find in Wright’s novel sources or inspirations for additional political and philosophical positions.

Similarly stimulating is Jane Anna Gordon’s wide-ranging essay that concludes the volume, “Slavery Continued, Freedom Sought: Wright’s Political Intellectual Journey.” She argues that some of Wright’s observations of his life in exile suggest an affinity to Juliet Hooker’s account of Frederick Douglass’s outline of a “fugitive democratic ethos” that embraces and extends Sheldon Wolin’s notion of “fugitive democracy.” Students of Douglass and of democracy generally should take note of the fascinating areas for further research that her argument suggests. Cedric J. Robinson’s previously published chapter, “Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory,” is the classic exposition of what the editors describe as Wright’s “lifelong creative and critical grappling with Marxism” (p. 9). Robinson makes the challenging claim that Wright’s novels—Native Son, The Outsider, and Island of Hallucination—and his collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, are in fact “studies of Marxism as a theory of history and social revolution,” of the “social and psychological development of the American working class,” and of “American Blacks,” but are more “authentic” documents than the conventional source “for they were constructed from lives with which he was intimate” (p. 47). Lewis Gordon’s magisterial “Wright’s Afromodern Search for Political Freedom” introduces many of the central themes on liberation discussed by other essays in the volume, and Abdul R. JanMohamed’s learned entry attempts to extend his analysis of what he calls the “unconscious death contract” that he began in his important book, The Death-Bound-Subject. His discussion is subtle and erudite, as readers of his work will expect, but I found myself wondering whether it might have been expedited by further pressure on Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death.

Yet Tommy J. Curry’s essay, “He’s a Rapist, Even When He’s Not,” will probably attract the most attention in the collection. Drawing on Wright’s short story “Man of All Work,” as well as on his essay “Behind the McGee Case,” included in this volume, Curry tries to establish the fact, widely neglected by scholars, of Black men’s sexual vulnerability to white men and women.

Sometimes the exposition is less clear than it could and should be, but the essays do suggest many areas for further research in history, psychology, and philosophy. They are usefully cross referenced, and there is a fine list of books and articles for further reading. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Michael S. Harper and Professor Cedric J. Robinson.