On a Thursday afternoon in early October, a room on the fourth floor of Pillsbury Hall will host a talk with a title that reads like a provocation: "Richard Wright's Antifascist Blueprint: Or How Mamdani Won New York." The speaker is Deborah Mutnick, a professor of English at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, who will discuss her new book on the politics and poetics of Richard Wright. She will be joined in conversation by Yuichiro Onishi, who teaches in the University of Minnesota's Department of African American & African Studies and its Asian American Studies Program. The event is free, and no reservation is required.
The pairing of Wright, the midcentury Black novelist and essayist, with Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who was elected mayor of New York City in 2025, is not as arbitrary as it might first appear. Wright spent his career thinking about how racism and class exploitation worked together, and about how a multiracial coalition might dismantle both. Mamdani's winning campaign, which assembled what observers repeatedly described as a "multiracial working class" coalition, is the kind of political formation Wright spent his later years trying to imagine on the page.
Wright was born in Mississippi in 1908 and came of age in Chicago, where he joined the Communist Party and published "Uncle Tom's Children" in 1938, followed by "Native Son" in 1940 and his autobiography, "Black Boy," in 1945. In "How Bigger Was Born," his famous essay about the making of "Native Son," Wright wrote that his protagonist "carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism" -- a formulation that framed the political stakes of Black life as a choice between two futures, one of solidarity and one of reaction. That instinct, Mutnick argues, ran through everything he wrote.
Mutnick's book, "No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright," published by the University of North Carolina Press, is a major reconsideration of Wright's life and work. It challenges the standard evaluation of him as a self-taught outsider, reexamines his late novels and travel books, and takes seriously his political commitments after he broke with the Communist Party USA. Mutnick reads Wright through Marx's ideas about historical materialism, alienation, and commodity fetishism, and she gives sustained attention to his complicated gender politics. She also examines his ecological consciousness -- his closeness to nature in his youth and again late in life -- and his early mapping of what she calls the "second nature" of the sociocultural world, the racial geography that overlaps with and transforms the natural one. The book joins a recent surge of scholarship treating Wright's later nonfiction as a forerunner of the Black radical internationalism that would flower in the 1960s and 1970s.
That internationalist thread is where Onishi's own work meets Wright's. Onishi is the author of "Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Twentieth-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa," which traces how Black intellectual-activists including Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois forged solidarities with Japan and Okinawa against white supremacy, and how Japanese scholars and multiracial activists in U.S.-occupied Okinawa built coalitions of their own. Wright himself traveled widely in the later part of his life, writing about the Bandung Conference of 1955 and about Indonesia and Africa, and his late nonfiction is increasingly read as an early map of the connections between antiracism, anticolonialism, and antifascism. A conversation between a scholar of Wright's Marxism and a scholar of Afro-Asian solidarity is a natural fit.
Mutnick's interest in Wright is not purely literary. She has spent much of her career on writing instruction and public intellectual work, and she co-founded Writing Democracy, an initiative inspired by the New Deal-era Federal Writers' Project, which had employed Wright in Chicago in the 1930s. That project, which began with a conference at Texas A&M University-Commerce in 2011, produced a special issue of the Community Literacy Journal that won a "Best Public Intellectual Special Issue" award from the Council of Learned Journals, and later an edited collection. Her first book, "Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education," appeared in 1996. The through-line is consistent: who gets to write, who gets heard, and what political work writing does.
The venue is fitting. Pillsbury Hall, built in 1889, is the second-oldest building on the Twin Cities campus, a sandstone landmark named for John S. Pillsbury, the Minnesota governor and university regent who rescued the fledgling institution financially in the 1860s and later personally funded a "hall of science." After more than twenty years of planning, the building was renovated and became the permanent home of the Department of English, which had spent nearly half a century in temporary quarters in Lind Hall. The department's own history notes that when students were asked what a permanent home should include, their answers boiled down to a single word: community. The building now houses offices, classrooms, public readings, and gathering spaces for roughly 500 majors, 35 faculty, and 110 graduate students.
It is in that spirit that a free, unreserved lecture on a Thursday afternoon makes a certain sense. The talk asks its audience to hold two moments together: a Black writer in the 1930s and 1940s insisting that fascism and racism were the same fight, and a 2025 mayoral campaign in New York that turned a multiracial coalition into an electoral majority. Whether or not one accepts the title's causal claim, the question it poses -- what an old antifascist blueprint might still be good for -- is the kind of thing the English department's new home was built to argue about out loud.
The event runs from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, 2026, in room 412 of Pillsbury Hall, 310 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis.