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J Afr Am St (2011) 15:560566
DOI 10.1007/s12111-011-9160-7
BOOK REVIEW
Mamoun Falah Issa Alzoubi
Published online: 29 January 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abbreviation
CC The Color Curtain
The Color Curtain is divided into five sections: Bandung: Beyond Left and Right, Race and Religion at Bandung, Communism at Bandung, Racial Shame at Bandung, and The Western World at Bandung. In each section Wright records either the interviews he conducted or the speeches he heard and reacts to each accordingly. Race and religion are the major themes of the book because they, more than politics, were major issues addressed at the conference.
Traveling in Spain and the Gold Coast convinced Wright that there were so many more exciting and interesting things happening in the world. By 1955 the problem of the American Negro, which Wright called childs play compared to the naked tensions gripping Asia and Africa (Wright 1995, CC 178), no longer preoccupied his thoughts. In fact Wrights interest in the Third World had now replaced his concern for the race problem in his native land.
It was only natural, then, that Wright reacted enthusiastically when learning about the Bandung conference, a meeting of non-Western nations to discuss, among other things, the social, economic, political, and cultural problems the countries had in common. The kind of meeting no anthropologist, no sociologist, no political scientist would ever have dreamed of staging (CC 13), Bandung was the first of its kind and represented for Wright a forum in which third world leaders could come together and debate some of the major issues that had interested him since his discussions with Sartre, de Beauvoir, and members of Presence Africaine almost 10 years earlier. In the opening pages of The Color Curtain Wright can hardly contain his enthusiasm after reading about the conference in an evening newspaper:
Then I was staring at the news item that baffled me. I bent forward and read the item a second time. Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Africa and Asia
M. F. I. Alzoubi (*)
Kent State University, Summit East Street, Center for Adult and Veteran Services, Kent, OH 44242, USAe-mail: [email protected]
Richard Wrights The Color Curtain: Paths for Intercultural Dialogue
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