Richard Wright and the Literary Popular Front: Progressive Interwar Writers, Antiracist Nationalism, and the Cold War Birth of World Literature

Abstract Richard Wright is exemplary of an interwar version of world literature, undergirded by the cultural centers of Moscow and Paris, that valorized progressive antiracist nationalism. Influenced by leftist writers like André Malraux, Wright created the masterpiece of this literary Popular Front, Native Son . During the postwar Red Scare, Wright continued his Popular Front–style cultural politics in Paris, helping France resist the CIA-engineered cultural Cold War. His underappreciated The Outsider resists the construction of a politically quietist canon of high modernist world literature. Although Wright himself later advanced an American exceptionalist perspective in the 1950s, the circulation and translation of his early work inspired a generation of anticolonial writers, such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ousmane Sembène, and Frantz Fanon. Today's globalization-driven world literature models overlook or actively seek to discredit Wright's progressive and antiracist model.