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Afro-Southeast Asia Archive
(1947 - ) African American Writers in Southeast Asia Archive Excerpt from “A Weekend with Richard Wright Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) The Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC) (1966-1973) Contemporary Korean Art exhibition (1960-1961)
The Malaysia Mission vs. Maphilindo Diosdado Macapagal’s Foreign Diplomacy Robert Kennedy’s trip to the Far East (1964) Newsreels from Sabah
 



African American Writers in Southeast Asia Archive   

“Indonesian Notebook”
Richard Wright
Encounter 23 (August 1955): 24-31
London for The Congress For Cultural Freedom
Paris

Book jacket, The Pitiful and the Proud
Carl T. Rowan
1956
Random House
New York

A World on the Move: A history of Colonialism and Nationalism in Asia and North Africa from the Turn of the Century to the Bandung Conference
1955
Djambatan, International Educational Publishing House
Amsterdam

The Color Curtain: A Report on The Bandung Conference
Richard Wright
1956
The World Publishing Company
Cleveland and New York

The Cold War was defined by a competition between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union and their competing ideologies of democracy and communism. After World War II and in light of the civil rights movement in the US in the 1950s, one of the key critiques that the Soviet Union leveled against the US was its policies of racial segregation. To counter this narrative, the State department mobilized African American artists, musicians, journalists, and cultural producers through education and cultural exchange programmes as diplomats of American democracy. One of these individuals was the journalist, Carl T. Rowan, who would later work for the Kennedy and Lyndon-Johnson presidencies, and would in 1964 become the first African American director of the United States Information Agency, the administrators of American Cold War cultural diplomacy. In 1954 and 1955, Rowan would travel through Southeast Asia meeting cultural producers and nation-builders and attend the Bandung Conference of 1955. Upon his return, he published a travelogue The Pitiful and The Proud. At the same time that the state department was sending African American thinkers and writers to Southeast Asia, the Bandung Conference of 1955 also drew them to Southeast Asia. The most famous of which was Richard Wright, the African American writer and thinker, who would go on to write one of the most read accounts of the Bandung Conference, The Color Curtain. Wright would meet such Indonesian intellectuals as Mochtar Lubis, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, Asrul Sani, Ajip Rosidi, Achdiat Karta Mihardja, and Beb Vuyk who he would anonymously quote in The Color Curtain. Wright’s travels to Indonesia were funded by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, an organization that in the 1970s was revealed to be funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The Congress would also publish the essay, Indonesian Notebook, which would later become part of The Color Curtain. The essay would prove to be controversial and solicited a response from the Indonesian novelista nd newspaper editor Mochtar Lubis who would accuse Wright of inaccuracy and misrepresentation. Mochtar’s response claimed that Wright overstated “racial business” as a way of life in Asia was published in the March 1956 issue of Encounter magazine.