Posted on June 1, 2001 at 3:30 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — African-American novelist Richard Wright became famous for his novel Native Son and his autobiography Black Boy. But he also wrote several travel books, not as a sightseer, but as an observer of several emerging nations’ struggling against colonialism and oppression in the decade following World War II. His narratives are the subject of a new book edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, Ph.D., titled Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections, published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Smith is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her 237-page book is a compilation of essays written by her and six other writers from around the world.

Wright began his travel narratives following his self-exile to Paris in 1946. Several events had broadened his world view, including the rise of the Pan-Africanist movement to decolonize Africa and Indonesia’s declaration of independence from colonial rule in 1945. During the 1950s, Wright traveled to several emerging nations, including Ghana, Indonesia and Spain, which led to the publication of his travel narratives. In Black Power, Wright takes readers along to see the anti-colonial initiatives in Ghana. In The Color Curtain, Wright records a conference of leaders from 29 formerly colonized nations as they draft strategies to protect themselves against Western rule while recognizing their need for the technological advances of the United States and Russia. He examines Francisco Franco’s Fascist regime in Pagan Spain and in White Man Listen! Wright discusses the relationship between the East and West in terms of colonial rule. Wright was preparing a fifth book on French West Africa when he died in 1960 at the age of 52.

“He [Wright] uses travel writing as a social-political forum much in the stead of Anglo writers in the 19th and 20th century to make a statement about the struggles for freedom by black, brown and yellow people and the religiously oppressed people,” said Smith. “He also reprises a form of the African-American travel narrative rarely used by blacks in the culture because few had the luxury of pleasure travel. He also prophesied the rise of post-colonial studies in the academy that is present today,” said Smith.

Smith teaches African-American literature at UAB. Her work has appeared in African American Review, Mississippi Quarterly and Approaches to Teaching Wright’s “Native Son.”