NOELLE MORRISSETTE AND AMRITJIT SINGH
James Weldon Johnson, who thought of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a living, moving work—a “biography of the race”—no doubt would have had much to add to his novel as he viewed more than a century of African American experiences following its publication. The novel has proven prescient in the way it anticipated the ongoing story of African American life. This story, still unfolding in the twenty-first century, is central to everything the United States as a nation stands for. As Ralph Ellison reminds readers in his essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” it is important that “we view the whole of American life as a drama acted upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”1 In reading The Autobiography today, one cannot possibly ignore Ellison’s notion of the centrality of race to every aspect of American life. While The Autobiography explores binaries of social class as well as the creative tensions between ragtime and European classical music, it also narrates the practices and categories shaping literary study: nationally bounded formations of canon and tradition, transnational crossings and affiliations, and the place of literature and literary study in the world.
In his autobiography, Along This Way, Johnson refers to “collateral knowledge” as a driving concept that links cultural and historical contexts and literary texts. Johnson’s “West Indian cobbler,” who served as his teacher for a brief time when he was away from Atlanta University, possessed, in Johnson’s estimation, “a considerable store of collateral knowledge” that “stir[red] my curiosity and interest in what I studied.”2 “This collateral information not only made it [Johnson’s study] interesting, but gave it sense and connected it up with life” (Along This Way, 93). Johnson’s orientation to his studies and to the world was critically altered by his time spent with this man, whose name is now forgotten and who “disappeared” within the year (99). “The only other teacher who made a subject as interesting to me as did this little cobbler was Brander Matthews at Columbia. I wonder just what it was that kept him down on a cobbler’s bench?” Johnson asks rhetorically (93).
Like his many successors in nonviolent resistance to oppression—Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, among them—Johnson trained as a lawyer and expansively directed this expertise to the larger endeavor of human understanding. Through writing, scholarship, and activism Johnson devoted his life to providing an understanding of race and expounding on the meaning and promise of America. In almost all areas of his layered career, he strove to confront the Janus-faced United States on the issue of freedom and slavery. In the process, he troubled the mythic claims of liberty associated with “America,” bidding the ancestral bards of African American experiences to speak and be heard. Through these endeavors, he insisted on addressing the past and present of racial oppression and on changing public policy not only through law but also through sociocultural outlook. Reaching for that future—as yet ungraspable—in which African American culture and citizenship can be fully realized, Johnson directed the nation’s focus to its history of slavery and racial oppression in order to imagine and realize a better future for all. He devoted his life to this future.
Such a future nation would be composed of world citizens, “cosmopolites.” While the concept of cosmopolitanism has not been fulfilled in its quest for universal understanding and human mutuality and has been associated with imperialism, nationalism, and parochialism, it persists as a useable, if shifting, measure of academic and real-world relations.3 Johnson’s distinct use of the term in his writings referenced not its widely held negative association with the contradictory claims of world citizenship and world imperialism, but its usefulness as a concept of intercultural understanding and tolerance.4 This collaborative framework operated for Johnson through the productive tension between the nation and national belonging, to which he remained committed, and transnational cultural identifications created by the conditions of modernity. African Americans of necessity possess this greater awareness. The Black Atlantic, framing modern life for African peoples through the transatlantic slave trade, was immediately and forcibly recognizable to its descendants as part of their “collateral knowledge.” As Paul Gilroy points out, this diasporic condition created a “countercultural” modernity in which thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Johnson could productively challenge the politically oppressive framework of the nation, even while remaining committed to it.5 The violent modernity that made the Black Atlantic became, in the writings of Johnson, an innovative concept that enabled transnational movement and the affiliation of raced and colonized peoples beyond limiting, nationally bounded discourses of identity and homeland. In this search for greater freedom and its attendant justice, other peoples might join African Americans and share a heightened sense of affiliation and identification.
The Autobiography stands in solidarity with a few works of African American fiction from the first half of the twentieth century—such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style (1933) and Plum Bun (1929), George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), and Chester Himes’s The Third Generation (1954)—that have brought a sharp perspective on the social disease of colorism that emanates from facing the daily “burden of the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each and every colored man in the United States.”6 At the same time, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s nomenclature of “colored people” instead of “Negroes” signaled an early recognition of inclusiveness that began to embrace all those who are dispossessed and marginalized. As texts such as Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) and The World and Africa (1947), Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954) and The Color Curtain (1956), Ian Haney López’s White by Law (1996), and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color (1998) demonstrate, “race” in theory and praxis is both capacious and contextual, going well beyond the black-white binary in the United States.
Not simply the cosmopolitanism of individuals, but also the nature of our lives indicates our global interconnectedness.7 As U.S. Supreme Court justices debate the place of other nations’ laws in America’s consideration of fairness and legitimacy, their very conversations make apparent the nation’s best and worst dispositions in the search for social justice. On the one hand, U.S. courts claim the nation’s uniqueness, which may be used to justify the evasion of obligations to international contexts and other peoples. On the other, court debates have demonstrated at least partial recognition of the shared human condition of injustice and made the case for interdependence.8 Global interconnectedness makes obvious our obligation to each other, while also revealing the inequities of new systems of slavery, capitalism, and power.
Cosmopolitanism’s early twentieth-century moment of globalization and imperialist crisis resounds in this twenty-first-century moment. The nativist and xenophobic turn in the 2015–16 presidential debates has turned on its head the powerful antinativist timbre of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (1903) and Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” (1916). The loud anti-immigrant sentiments of 2016 appear to echo Theodore Roosevelt’s claim in 1904 that “we cannot have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind. The need is to devise some system by which undesirable immigrants shall be kept out entirely, while desirable immigrants are properly distributed throughout the country.”9 Discussion of U.S. citizenship simultaneously entails, however, acknowledgment of U.S. imperialism, as Johnson knew. Both his editorial “Why Latin America Dislikes the United States” (1913) and his “Style of Business Correspondence” (1909), submitted in triplicate to the State Department at the start of his diplomatic posting to Nicaragua, demonstrate Johnson’s awareness of these interdependent concerns.10 Contemporary debates on immigration, combined with continuing concerns about the citizenship rights of African Americans within the republic, demonstrate a nativist, exclusionary privilege of white citizenship and its racial order that has both national and global implications. There is a reluctance to confront white supremacy at home or to acknowledge the economic exploitation of other, often nonwhite nations that undergirds globalization and neoliberal capitalism.11
As a diplomat and public intellectual, Johnson was involved with several of the events that founded this order in the twentieth century: the Platt Amendment permitting U.S. intervention in Cuba and establishing the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay (1901, approved 1903); Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), as well as the Venezuelan crisis (1902–3) that prompted it; and the postcrisis situation into which Johnson was introduced as a U.S. diplomat to that nation (1906–9). In hindsight it is obvious that the Monroe Doctrine protected U.S. imperialist interests in the hemisphere, particularly but not limited to Latin America. Roosevelt’s corollary took the protectionist doctrine a step further, using it to justify U.S. intervention in and annexation of those nations. The Platt Amendment, which removed the U.S. occupation of Cuba, also ensured a continued American presence through the naval base there and by justifying U.S. intervention when needed to defend Cuban “sovereignty.” American interventions have often been couched in terms of business and financial obligations, as was the case in Haiti (U.S. occupation of that nation stretched from 1914 to 1934).
Johnson would have recognized in this twenty-first-century discourse of immigration and citizenship rights the perpetual “us” versus “them,” which is defined not simply by war but by the American imperialist agenda imposed on French- and Spanish-speaking as well as African-descended peoples of the hemispheres of America.12 No doubt he also would have recognized in the twentieth-century segregationist practices imposed on U.S. citizens of Mexican descent their similarity to African American oppression. Today’s waves of Mexican American migration and Mexican immigration not only help to sharpen recall of Native American genocide, but also illuminate African American experiences of displacement and second-class citizenship, which has included systemic practices that define contingent labor forces and even contingent citizenship.13
The landscapes of memory, spectral and symbolic in Johnson’s 1912 novel, continue to mark national attitudes toward the past and present in the United States, which is decisively defined by slavery and continued forms of oppression. Discursively engaged with the myth and reality of America and with the brutal logic of terror enacted on raced subjects, be they Haitian, Mexican, Native American, or African American, Johnson would have recognized the documented examples of twenty-first-century police brutality and terror from Ohio, South Carolina, New York, and Texas. The high stakes that have been placed on romanticizing the past of slavery have enabled the imposition of continued acts of terror on slavery’s survivors. The slaying of nine African American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 was both an act of white supremacy and an attempt to control the history of slavery.14 To discuss the promise of the United States, Johnson argued, it is also necessary to address its betrayals of that promise to the peoples within its gates—peoples whose lives provide evidence of the nation’s shameful, oppressive practices. Only through such acknowledgment can the nation reach its ideal, better future—altered by the recognition and inclusion of all of its peoples.15 There are similar notes in the fictional writings of Johnson’s contemporaries, such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Anzia Yezierska.16
Literature, in order to succeed, must bear a relation to the real world, even if that bond is forged through a relation that does not yet exist. Literary study is a necessary act that affirms this human connection. Johnson recognized the importance of university study, especially the disciplines of history, literature, drama, art, and education. He was acutely aware of his role as an African American educator, humanist, and cosmopolite at Columbia’s and New York University’s teachers colleges. The very scene of those classrooms could cultivate the moral imagination of individuals in conversation with each other. As one assesses the meaning and value of education in the digital age, one ought to recall Johnson’s description of his 1912 narrative as a “human document”: a complex work contemplating human thoughts, actions, and works of art. To place the Ex-Colored Man in the twenty-first-century classroom is to recognize the urgency of freeing knowledge from a perceived uniformity and facticity through human contact and a commitment to multiple “discrepant engagements”—to “collateral knowledge” and to the “family bookshelf” of African American literature.17 Studying Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man today affirms the crucial nature of such readings. Personal and ancestral literary readings open consciousness and enable shared intellectual, cultural, and racial expansion.
The archive, Johnson knew, has a life of its own: its liveliness points toward this collection of essays more than a hundred years after The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s initial publication. The essays offered here bring together a wide range of perspectives on The Autobiography and its creator. They are reevaluations of Johnson’s work, and they acknowledge the power of The Autobiography and its literary interpretations in the twenty-first century. The record of black cultural expression has expanded in the hundred years since its publication, but the promise of a more attentive and attuned nation has yet to be fulfilled. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s retrospective framework of seeming regret (“I cannot suppress the thought that . . . I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage”; the shadowy recollections of his origins in slavery and Reconstruction) leaves Johnson’s readers poised on the edge of a new, modern reality. Johnson’s tale was not a historical retelling, nor was it exclusively engaged with the representational strategies of the culture of uplift. Rather, its “forward glance” anticipated the intellectual work of Afrofuturism—a historical and cultural foundation of black popular culture extended into the future through technology and knowledge formation.18
Reading The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man now, one might consider how crucial are current endeavors to interpret issues of human existence in the digital age: what is available, and how, and what it means about “us.” The new critical tools—whether the recognition of an “ethnic archive,” the interrogation of the “literary classic,” or a more expansive theorization of knowledge practices—do not replace the older concepts of knowledge, but instead make them relevant and more widely acknowledged. Interpreters must integrate their encounters with other individuals, ideas, and cultures; absorb, copy, and make intimate the random knowledges offered by the archive. To be transformed is also to transform our understanding of humanity, to be explained as well as to interpret ourselves to each other. These interpretative and biographical processes help reveal the ways in which literature and literary study shape our experiences and articulate our transformations in the modern world. As the inheritors of Johnson’s beautiful work, let us imagine and produce the still-unwritten chapters of this ongoing narrative.
1. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John Callahan (New York: Random House, 1995), 85.
2. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking, 1933), 93, 100. Future references are given parenthetically in the text.
3. Janet Lyon, “Review of Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation,” Politics and Culture (October 2, 2009): n.p.
4. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
5. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
6. Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 13.
7. Daphne Lamothe’s essay in this collection poignantly demonstrates this point.
8. Stephen Breyer documents this debate among the justices in The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (New York: Knopf, 2015).
9. Jacob Riis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen (1904; rpt., e-book, Bartleby.com, 2000), 46. See also Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor, 1820–1924 (London: Academic, 1984).
10. Johnson, “Why Latin America Dislikes the United States,” in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2:195–97; Johnson, “Style of Business Correspondence,” Diplomatic Records, Nicaragua, register 84, vol. 308, National Archives II, College Park, Md. See my discussion of this report in Morrissette, Modern Soundscapes, 75–76.
11. In line with the twisted ironies that often mark U.S. history, the U.S. Congress offered an apology in 2012 for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its sundry progeny, which kept Chinese and other Asian immigrants out of the United States between 1882 and 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act.
12. See John Cullen Gruesser, The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), esp. chap. 4, “Annexation in the Pacific and Asian Conspiracy in Central America in James Weldon Johnson’s Unproduced Operettas.”
13. Mexicans living in the current southwestern region of the United States were colonized by America as the result of the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The United States has used soldiers of Mexican descent in every conflict since World War II, while still denying them citizenship. The Bracero Program of 1942–64 brought Mexican workers to labor in America, while President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Operation Wet-back (1954) deported them. The internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II provides another example of contingent citizenship.
14. A dispute had unfolded in Charleston in 2014, when, after rancorous debate, Denmark Vesey had received a statue acknowledging his place in the city’s history. Vesey had organized a widespread rebellion against slavery in 1822, but the plot was exposed just days before the insurrection was to take place. He and five other men were publicly hanged as a consequence.
15. Several contemporary works demand this acknowledgment, including Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2001); and Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic Monthly, June 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/. See also Coates’s Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015).
16. For example, the protagonist in Yezierska’s “America and I” (1923) is disillusioned as she searches for her “big idea” of America: “I felt that the America that I sought was nothing but a shadow—an echo—a chimera of lunatics and crazy immigrants.” In Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. D: Modern Period, 1910–1945, 7th ed., ed. Paul Lauter et al. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage, 2014), 2323.
17. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Robert Stepto recalls, he was “initially a ‘family bookshelf’ Afro-Americanist,” and writing From behind the Veil was “a revisitation of family bookshelves and a brave effort to render the academic world more familiar—if not exactly familial—by writing myself into the intellectual impulses and traditions which were responsible for there being in the first place any family books to shelve” (From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2nd ed. [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], x).
18. The phrase “forward glance,” taken from the conclusion of Along This Way, demonstrates Johnson’s future-oriented narrative framing of black cultural politics in the United States. Afrofuturism, a multivalent term for countless genres, styles, and authors from the 1970s on, conveys the presence and importance of race in technology and the future. See Alondra Nelson, ed., Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text 71 (June 3, 2002). Johnson anticipated this concept in his interest in the “scientific basis” of ragtime and its performativity in technology and future modalities of time, space, and reproduction.