Legacies of Resistance. Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics

• Authors: Anita Patterson

Abstracts

EN

Emerson’s affinity with Buddhism has been the source of much controversy, and his adaptation of the doctrine translated as Buddhist “indifference” has been construed as stifling resistance to social injustice. I will revisit this topic, explaining why Emerson figures so prominently in discussions of Buddhism by the philosopher D. T. Suzuki and the British scholar R. H. Blyth, in order to develop a context for analyzing modes of resistance in Richard Wright’s late haiku-inspired poetry. A central question raised in critical debates is whether or not Wright turns away in these poems from the social and political concerns of his earlier works. I will show that their significance and force as protest poetry is considerably stronger when regarded in light of Wright’s “tough-souled pragmatism” and an Emersonian pragmatist tradition elaborated by scholars such as Cornel West, James Albrecht, and Douglas Anderson, a tradition characterized by East-West intercultural exchange that includes John Dewey and Ralph Ellison. Contextualized and enriched by this tradition, the poem Wright selected out of the 4000 to open his collection, “I am nobody,” can be read as alluding to Ellison’s allusion to Emerson in Invisible Man, protesting what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would some years later memorably describe as “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” I will conclude with a brief consideration of how Wright’s creative engagement with Buddhism in the work of T. S. Eliot illuminates Emerson’s vastly neglected contribution to the development of high modernism.

Keywords

EN

transpacific; pragmatism; haiku; Buddhism; Richard Wright; Ralph Waldo Emerson; modernism; African American literature; John Dewey; T. S. Eliot

• Publisher: University of Silesia Press
• Journal: Review of International American Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 159-176

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Anita Patterson

• Boston University

• https://orcid.org/0000000225303628

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Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/rias.15606

Biblioteka Nauki

35192504