Callaloo

In the very principle of its constitution, in its language, and in its finalities, narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity.

—Achille Mbembe

In James Baldwin’s scandalous 1961 eulogy, “Alas, Poor Richard,” he seems to praise his deceased mentor, Richard Wright, with the most backhanded attack, observing that until the end, despite his world travels, Wright always remained the “Mississippi pickaninny” (148).¹ Such a pronouncement could be chalked up to the bitter Oedipal rivalry that Baldwin seemed to engage despite Wright’s generosity toward the younger writer. This vision of Wright as trapped by the Jim Crow mentality that he made a career of having left behind contradicts the recent resuscitation of Wright as an exemplar of cosmopolitan critique in the work of Trans-Atlantic Studies. In Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Wright is an exception that proves the rule, as he represents a rare African American intellectual who rises above the parochialism that characterizes African American culture to embrace an international cosmopolitanism that bridges the long history tying global politics to African American culture. Gilroy’s apologia for Wright pits the expatriate author against what Gilroy calls “the claims of African-American particularity,” a phrase that resonates with a charge of African American parochialism (155). In Gilroy’s critique, the scholar George Kent stands in for the black American critical establishment, incapable of understanding the broader implications of Wright’s cosmopolitan reach. Kent attacks Wright’s travelogues as ranging “from that of a bright, but somewhat snippish Western tourist to that of a Western schoolmarm” (83). Gilroy notes the unpopularity of these travelogues with “the black American reading public, who looked in vain for a reflection of their experiences in works that must have seemed esoteric.” Gilroy comes to the defense of these travel books, especially Black Power, as bearing “witness to the value of critical perceptions that could only have been gained through the restlessness, even homelessness, that [Wright] sometimes manages to make into an analytic opportunity” (150). For Gilroy, the transition from works like Native Son to those like Black Power charts a progress from African American particularity to global consciousness, what Gilroy calls “a gradual change in his thinking whereby a sense of the urgency of anti-colonial political struggle displaced an earlier exclusive interest in the liberation of African-Americans from their particular economic exploitation and political oppression” (148).² The cosmopolite as a global traveler tends to invert the modern [End Page 887] origins of the concept during the Enlightenment, which figured cosmopolitanism as the hospitality owed to foreigners in one’s nation home. This idea that a certain kind of travel equates with a certain kind of intellectual and political progress is endemic to a certain kind of trans-Atlantic postcolonial studies. Craig Calhoun sums up the seductiveness of this “frequent traveler” version of cosmopolitanism thus:

Many rightly point to the limits and dangers of relying on nation-states to secure democracy in a world that is ever more dramatically organized across state borders. Yet they—we—imagine the world from the vantage point of frequent travelers, easily entering and exiting polities and social relations around the world, armed with visa-friendly passports and credit cards. For such frequent travelers cosmopolitanism has considerable rhetorical advantage. It seems hard not to want to be a “citizen of the world.” Certainly, at least in Western academic circles, it is hard to imagine preferring to be known as parochial.

(89)³

Calhoun lodges his critique of traveler cosmopolitanism with the unsurprising truism that “Cosmopolitanism is a discourse centred in a Western view of the world” (90). Of course, by attacking Wright as he does, Baldwin is implicitly claiming a higher cosmopolitan viewpoint, but one not necessarily grounded in assumptions of Europe as the source of cosmopolitan pedigree, an assumption that operates subtly if powerfully in the work of many trans-Atlantic intellectuals.

Although I do not want to reproduce Baldwin’s ad...