Konfrontasi’s “Synopsis” of Wright’s “American Negro Writing” (1955)

Wright spent the weekend before his departure from Indonesia as a guest of the Konfrontasi Study Club at the mountain villa of the magazine’s founder and principal editor, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana. Wright’s lecture to the Study Club was later published in English in Konfrontasi, in substantially the same form as it later appeared in Wright’s 1957 collection White Man, Listen! Although it appeared in Konfrontasi in English, this publication of Wright’s lecture was accompanied by an Indonesian-language synopsis that interprets the lecture in a manner that aligns it with Konfrontasi’s position in Indonesian literary and ideological debates of this time. To do this, the synopsis repositions Wright’s defense of politically partisan writing in support of an oppressed people as the struggle of humanity in general, lest Wright’s valorization of African American writers’ confrontation with racial oppression be seen to endorse the views of Konfrontasi’s ideological opponents, who were associated with the Institute of People’s Culture (LEKRA), a cultural organization aligned with the Communist Party.