Transnational Black Chicago: Richard Wright and the Shooting of Native Son in Peronist Argentina

In 1949, American writer Richard Wright decided to adapt into a film his masterpiece Native Son. With an African American like Bigger Thomas as its main character, the project was unanimously rejected in Hollywood and New York. Wright, then living in Paris, found in the French director Pierre Chenal a partner for his project. They both turned their interest to Argentina, where the then-powerful movie industry under Peronist control embraced the project and where Chenal had already been working during World War Two.

The analysis of the shooting of Native Son and its later release allows us to explore some hidden dynamics of the early years of the Cold War in Latin America. First, it opens a window into the way in which racial dynamics in domestic U.S. became an early field in which anti-U.S. movements in Latin America could challenge the American ideological dominance and its legitimacy in the region. For populist and nationalistic movements like Peronism, cultural industries became a privileged field for this battle. But also, this populist uses of racial conflicts in the U.S. shows an interesting part of Wright’s intellectual evolution towards an “internationalization of black politics.” As he started his self-exile in France, Wright’s focus remained on the situation of black people in the U.S. and racism in postwar America. But increasingly, he would locate these concerns in a larger global context that would lead him towards a more decided activism with African independence (or anti-colonial?) movements.

I locate this early contact with Peronist Argentina as part of that opening. But the complicated experience of the shooting, and the problems with the release of the movie in the United States, also illuminate the limitations of these early contacts of U.S. black intellectuals with Latin American populism.