BRUCE BARNHART
At a particularly important moment in his life, the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man finds himself on the receiving end of some rather bleak advice. In an attempt to discourage the narrator from returning to the United States, his wealthy patron tells him: “to attempt to right the wrongs and ease the sufferings of the world in general is a waste of effort. You had just as well try to bale [sic] the Atlantic by pouring the water into the Pacific.” The narrator has just told the patron of his ambition to compose a classical composition “on Negro themes,” a musical project that would voice “the hopes and ambitions of the American Negro.”1
The narrator sees his composition as a work that will play a part in bettering the conditions of African Americans. Like Johnson himself, he sees music and other forms of art as weapons in the struggle for African American equality.2 The narrator’s plan is hopeful and ambitious. It aims at a changed future, a future qualitatively different from the present. When the patron argues against this plan, he is essentially arguing against hope, ambition, and meaningful change. He tells the narrator to give up his idea of “making a Negro out of yourself” (The Autobiography, 145) and to give up on the idea of a future that is anything but a repetition of the present. The patron’s advice is an attempt to deny the future to the narrator and to negate his racial ambitions. Nobody else in the novel speaks to the narrator in this way, but there are a number of other forces that work to deny the future to him. The most powerful of these is a fiery lynching that delivers the final blow to the narrator’s musical and racial ambitions. Both the lynching and the patron’s advice are part of a system that works to deny futurity to the Ex-Coloured Man. This system is a racialized one, which works to forbid futurity to African Americans and to reserve its privileges for white subjects. Johnson’s novel makes this quite clear: as a “coloured” man, the narrator’s ambitions are repeatedly thwarted, but as an “ex-coloured man,” he quickly achieves a stable and secure future by way of real estate speculation.
This racialized denial of futurity has a long and persistent history in the United States. Perhaps the clearest statement of it comes from Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, in the form of a slave owner’s reply to Douglass’s request to hire out his own time. Douglass’s description of his owner’s reply reads as follows: “He told me if I would be happy, I must lay out no plans for the future. . . . he advised me to complete thoughtlessness of the future.”3 For Douglass’s owner, as for the wielders of racialized power in Johnson’s period and in the present, the future is a zone reserved for the reflective and speculative operations of white subjects. The kind of temporal segregation embodied in the advice of Douglass’s owner continued to operate in Johnson’s time period and throughout the twentieth century. The latest version of this kind of advice shapes the racialized working of the twenty-first-century trade in subprime mortgages.4 Johnson’s novel provides an insightful reading of this denial of futurity. It gives a rich sketch of the different forms it can take, and it compellingly dramatizes the effects they have on the narrator’s life. These effects are psychic and interior as well as practical; one of the most compelling aspects of The Autobiography is its account of the narrator’s psychic life and of the way this psychic life is shaped by external economic and social forces as well as internal conflicts and desires. What I am suggesting here is that a crucial part of the lasting importance of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is what the novel tells us about the relationships between race, subjectivity, and temporality.
Johnson’s narrator is divided between the lure of the white world and the pull of racial responsibility, but he is also divided between different temporal trajectories and different rhythms of attunement to the world. What Johnson’s novel exposes are the discrepant trajectories at work within the subject, trajectories that are both inherent in any human existence and that take on their particular shape and rhythm through the specific ways in which the subject suffers the weight of the social. These trajectories push and pull the subject in different temporal directions; the novel asks readers to pay special attention to the relationship between race and the different temporal trajectories that structure the subject.
Subjectivity is a temporal structure, because no matter how it is conceived, it must have some form of continuity across time. To be a subject is to have some way of connecting the present to both the past and the future.5 Without a temporal rhythm linking different moments in time, and without a temporal form binding its different psychic rhythms together, the subject cannot exist. The subject is given a particular set of temporal coordinates by a whole host of social institutions, including aesthetic forms like music and literature. The novel is a literary form of particular importance in understanding the relationship between time and subjectivity. As both Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukacs have argued, the novel is a genre that works to both codify and critique each society’s treatment of time.6 Novels work to give the passage of time a meaningful narrative form; the ways in which they do so reveal much about the rhythms and temporal patterns each social formation and the subjects that inhabit it use to give themselves a coherent, workable form.7 Johnson makes full use of the resources of the novel to explore the ways the social forces of the U.S. landscape work to inculcate a particular temporal orientation in its subjects. The Autobiography gives a rich and compelling portrait of the psychic rhythms at work within its narrator and of the way conceptions and practices of racialization affect the shape and valence of these rhythms.
One of the primary ways in which race works to structure the narrator’s psyche is by dint of the forces that work to prohibit to him and to other African Americans a productive trade with the future. The forces of racialization that Johnson’s narrator encounters work to confine his imaginative energies to the present. In doing so, they operate on one of the major axes of all subjective orientations. Every form of subjectivity is divided between two different temporal orientations: the repetitive and the speculative or futural. On the one hand, every subject is immersed in a regime of social habits: momentary, diurnal, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of repetitive actions and reactions that the subject accommodates itself to and incorporates into its own-most structure.8 On the other hand, every subject has a speculative, futural dimension: a component that reaches out of the given and the habitual by way of desire, ambition, hope, and other forms of social and subjective investment in a future that is in at least some small way different from the present.9
Johnson’s treatment of his narrator shows the way that racial prescriptions and prohibitions work to cut off full access to these two dimensions of subjectivity, cutting up the subject and standing in the way of its attempt to productively coordinate both temporal orientations. When the narrator encounters his patron’s argument against hope, it is one instance of a welter of forces that work to curtail the speculative dimensions of his subjectivity and heighten the importance of its repetitive dimension. In psychic economies as well as social ones, the primary result of excising the future is to make the present more repetitive. This tradeoff is evident in Johnson’s novel: as his narrator continues to have his hopes and ambitions thwarted, he becomes more aligned with the vicissitudes of repetition. In the narrator’s movement between “coloured” and “ex-coloured” positions, the working of racial division on subjective structures is made apparent. The racial system that the narrator encounters is a kind of temporal apartheid; it takes the division between the repetitive and the speculative that is internal to the subject and uses racial distinctions to hypostatize it and project it onto the divide between black and white subjects.10
The contrast between the economic positions that the narrator inhabits as a “coloured” man and as the Ex-Coloured Man is an exemplification of how this racialized logic functions.11 In his life as a “coloured” man, the narrator consistently inhabits positions dominated by repetition and by precarity, the possibility that he might need to start all over again at any moment. Both as a worker in a cigar factory and as a gambler in New York, the narrator lives with repetition and makes part of its dictates into a component of his psychic structure. In his life as an ex-colored man, he occupies a position in which repetition is muted and in which he gains success as an economic agent. With the narrator’s success as a speculative buyer and seller of real estate, his economic future expands and his psychic structure adapts to this new prominence of futural and speculative energies.12
Most of Johnson’s novel is concerned with the impact that the racialized denial of futurity and the resultant emphasis on repetition have on the narrator’s consciousness. The next part of this essay attempts to account for the insights that The Autobiography delivers about this relationship between race, repetition, and the structure of subjectivity. My aim is to show the way Johnson’s novel lays bare the significance of repetition, both exposing its utilization in unjust racial regimes and tracing the outlines of its productive role in creating subjective and social structures that work to transform these regimes.
The narrator spends most of the novel as a subject intimately acquainted with repetition. The dictates of a racialized economy give him his first job as a roller of cigars, a repetitive task in which remuneration is directly tied to the number of times one can repeat the actions necessary for the assembly of a complete cigar. This job can lead to a relatively high salary and a lucrative career, but it does not lead to any upward progress through the ranks of the tobacco industry. In the cigar factory and in most of his “coloured” life that follows, the narrator’s race and circumstances shape him in accordance with the dictates of repeating and restarting. To repeat is often to restart, to go back to a beginning point that has been gone through before. Both repetition and restarting play a crucial part in psychic life and are an unavoidable part of any social life. In addition, as I discuss below, Hortense Spillers and James Snead argue that repetition and African American strategies for harnessing it can be crucial components of productive psychic structures and vital cultural formations.
However, despite the necessity of repetition to existence, and despite the positive role that it can play in psychic and social life, there is something maliciously unjust in a system that makes racial difference an excuse for forcing African Americans into a position in which they must start all over again, giving up their previous ambitions and hard-won social and economic positions. The fate of Johnson’s narrator dramatizes this injustice. In The Autobiography, the shape of his life is determined by a number of events that forcefully knock him off his established path and force him to restart, rethink, and repeat his forward movement. The Ex-Coloured Man is forced to rethink his plans and restart his adult life when his tuition money is stolen. He is forced to start all over again when the tobacco plant in Jacksonville is closed down. He is forced to repetitively restart his career as a ragtime pianist when he is involved in a shooting at “the Club.” The terrifying force of a brutal lynching ends his plan of becoming a classical composer and forces the narrator to restart his life in New York City, where he becomes a white real estate speculator. Again and again, the narrator is forced to go back to a beginning that seemed settled and repetitively restart his life.
In his portrayal of these forced repetitions, Johnson shows the way that the racial system of the United States differentially apportions the need for repetition. The narrator’s fate as a “coloured” man functions as a critique of an unequal and racially determined requirement to repeat and restart what had already seemed settled. This imposition of repetition is one half of a system of racial injustice that works to reserve the easiest paths and the most rewarding futures for white subjects.13 Johnson’s novel dramatizes the narrator’s forced intimacy with repetition as determined by a series of events that violently shake the narrator and violently dispossess him of his economic means and volitional power. The novel focuses most overtly on the pragmatic effects of these events, but Johnson’s detailed sketch of the narrator’s interiority also shows the way this racialized insistence on repetition affects the subject on the deepest level, shaping his relationship to language and to himself.
The relationship between repetition, racism, and subjectivity is one that Hortense Spillers foregrounds in “All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” Working with a Lacanian model that emphasizes the entanglement of psychic and linguistic structures, Spillers reworks the psychoanalytic model to account for the way that racial prohibitions penetrate to the very core of the subject. This penetration has everything to do with repetition, as Spillers makes clear: “To speak is to occupy a place in [a] social economy, and, in the case of the racialized subject, his history has dictated that this linguistic right to use is never easily granted but must be earned, over and over again, on the level of a personal and collective struggle that requires in some way a confrontation with the principle of language as prohibition, as the withheld.”14 Here Spillers shares with Johnson an emphasis on the way in which repetition is a necessity imposed by racism. She shows subjectivity to be a function of one’s place in a social economy and one’s right to linguistically articulate one’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with this place. Unlike a white subject that is easily granted the right to linguistic articulation, the racialized subject has to linguistically repeat “over and over again” both its own identity and the mechanics by which it claims a right to speak or be heard.15 In its encounters with society’s different discursive fields, the racialized subject encounters hostility, prohibition, and/or indifference. The result is a heightened anxiety about the reception of the subject’s speech and a heightened reflexivity about the effects of repetition.
The racist structure of American society forces the African American subject to confront prohibition again and again, both linguistically and socially. Johnson’s narrator is banned from eating in certain places (The Autobiography, 57), from participating in certain occupations, and from pursuing his artistic ambitions without the terrifying threat of racial violence. Like Johnson, Spillers critiques these racial prohibitions and shows how they create a crippling environment that is psychic as well as social. However, and also like Johnson, Spillers suggests that this repetitive confrontation with forms of prohibition can give the racialized subject an acute insight into the workings of both the American social system and subjectivity itself.16 Spillers asserts that this repetitive need to establish one’s right to speak makes the racialized subject more aware of language as prohibition—as a force that cuts the subject off from her or his desire. The racialized subject is compelled to articulate its identity and its desires again and again because no articulation is fully successful. Part of this lack of success is the fact that no articulation can entirely remove the need for repetition; the most successful linguistic act(s) can force some recognition from the (white) world and can effectively articulate some desire, but it cannot, given the weight of history and the stubborn persistence of racism, succeed in securing a place for the racialized subject’s next utterance. In other words, what the racialized subject can never successfully establish is duration, a reorientation of the racialized social and discursive field lasting long enough to obviate the need for racialized subjects to repetitively fight for the right to articulate themselves and their desires. In this sense, language is prohibition because it blocks its unchallenged appropriation by the racialized subject.
On a deeper level, language is prohibition because of its incommensurability with the nonlinguistic world of desire. From a Lacanian perspective, language can never fully articulate desire because language and desire are two qualitatively different realms. The two realms come in contact with each other, but they only overlap in that small instant in which the subject is speaking. As a result, language can never capture desire; it can only get at it elliptically, by way of its entanglement in subjective, intersubjective, and social economies. Language does not function primarily as a description of this entanglement; it functions as a provocation used to elicit a response from the subject’s social surroundings and to push both the subject and its surroundings closer to the subject’s desires. Language marks the subject’s situatedness in what Spillers calls “the crossroads of conflicting motivations” and is its primary access to the “constant commerce in real and symbolic capital among struggling intersubjectivities” that make up U.S. social relations.17 There is an irreducible incompatibility between language, which belongs first and foremost to the social field, and desire, which comes to the social from the outside. Language and desire constitute overlapping gravitational fields, and the subject exists at the point of their overlap.
The result of this overlap is a doubleness that has a strong affinity with Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” a form of which shows up in The Autobiography. When Johnson’s narrator feels his thoughts and words “dictated” by race, he feels himself acquiring “a sort of dual personality” (The Autobiography, 21). Like Johnson, Spillers describes the doubleness of the racialized subject in ways that make the dictates of linguistic experience central and that also suggest the possible upside of this subject’s forced familiarity with the need to repeat and start over. Her description couples a sense of language as a marker of social position with the linguistic and psychoanalytic distinction between the speaking I (the “subject of the énonciation”) and the spoken I (the “subject of énoncé”). When one uses the pronoun I to articulate identity, one is divided between the spoken I, which leaves the subject’s lips or pen and travels in the world of discourse, and the implied but unspoken I, which utters the linguistic I but stands detached from it in a realm asymptotic to language. The spoken I is meant to stand for the subject (or the speaking I), but once it is uttered it is determined by its reception, by its relationship to other signifiers, and by the whole social realm of discourse and positionality that gives language meaning. In other words, once it leaves the subject’s lips, it is determined by forces largely out of the subject’s control. This aspect of the divided subject, the spoken I, is socially determined, discursively shaped, and in some sense removed from the other aspect of the divided subject, the speaking I. Social forces wrest the spoken I away from the speaking I, bending it to fit already existing linguistic patterns and social expectations.
Here is how Spillers describes this distinction: “The ‘one’ . . . is both a position in discourse—the spoken subject of énoncé that figures a grammatical instance, and a consciousness of positionality—the speaking subject of énonciation, the one in the act of speaking as [a] consciousness of position. As the former is mapped onto his/her world by discursive social practices, the latter comes into the realization that he/she is the ‘one’ who ‘counts.’”18 The language that Spillers uses to describe the division between the part of the subject determined by one’s positionality in the social field and the part of the subject conscious of but undetermined by this positionality suggests that this model does not only apply to the racialized subject. The division she describes is drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis, a discourse that has little to say about race.19 So, on the one hand, Spillers’s distinction does not necessarily appear to be raced. On the other hand, both Lacan and Spillers suggest that this division is something that the dominant fictions of any culture work to cover up or evade. As Johnson’s novel forcefully shows, race is the dominant fiction of U.S. culture. In the United States the fictions of white subjectivity work to evade the division of the subject and the truth that a significant part of its being is determined by forces outside of its control. What Spillers shows in her account of the racialized subject’s need to repetitively claim the right to speak is that the realities of race work in the opposite way for subjects racialized as black, brown, or yellow: these subjects are painfully familiar with the divide between their desires and the resistances of the social field. In other words, the consciousness of speaking subjects that their utterances are carried away from them by the resistances and prohibitions of the social world is a consciousness that comes easier to the racialized subject. The narrator of Johnson’s 1912 novel and the African American subjects that preceded and followed him are shaped and constrained by a welter of prohibitions; the primary medium of these prohibitions is language. The African American subject lives in a social world where language and prohibition often go together; this fact places this subject in a place where a consciousness of language’s resistance to desire and volition comes relatively easily.
This consciousness of language as prohibition and the resultant reflexivity about repetition, division, and the social structure of language are key elements of the way Spillers and Johnson limn the structure of racialized subjectivity. This is evident in Johnson’s account of the narrator’s entry into his life as a “coloured” man. When the narrator first becomes aware of his race, it alters his perception, his consciousness, and his relationship to language. When he learns that he is black, he “pass[es] into another world” and finds his “thoughts . . . coloured,” his “words dictated,” and his “actions limited by one dominating all-pervading idea which constantly increased in force and weight until I finally realized in it a great, tangible fact” (The Autobiography, 11). At this moment, the narrator feels the heavy hand of the social world upon him. It does not just limit him from the outside; “the great, tangible fact” of race prescribes and proscribes the shapes and patterns of his interior mental life and “dictates” the ways in which he will articulate his identity and desire. His words are not his own; he feels the power of language as an alien force that moves through him and divides him from his innermost sense of who he should be and what his social position should be. After this moment, the narrator will again and again approach language with a new wariness, a consciousness that each time he speaks he is doing battle with this interior alien. He gains a canny, reflexive awareness of the fact that if he does not carefully craft his utterances to take account of the social powers that work to make his language alien to his desires, he will constantly be consigned to an undesirable social position.
This moment in the novel establishes the template for everything that will follow. It is the first instance of an arbitrary or unmotivated event that forces on the narrator the need to repeat or rethink a beginning that he has already been through. It also gives the outlines of the alien but intimately interior force that he will have to repetitively confront again and again: “the great, tangible fact” of race. At the moment that the narrator is racialized, he is exposed to the insistent force of repetition and the power of language as a social force that is indifferent or hostile to his desires. At the same time, when the interrelated forces of race, language, and repetition strike the narrator, he becomes less of an individual. He does not become less human, but he is less structured by the fictions of self-possession, control, and self-containment that constitute individuality. To say this is to say, along with Spillers, that individuality is historically constituted by the interactions of social and economic forces. As she puts it, the “individual” is a “particle in constant bombardment . . . between and within races, and according to a modern cultural synthesis, brought on by industrialized capital in its precise historic formation and its aftermath that divide and specify ‘persons’ from ‘land,’ ‘family,’ and ‘other.’”20
“Individuality” is a name for a position within an overlapping web of economic and social relations that emerged in the eighteenth century. The black subject is not outside this web, but he or she does have a different relationship to almost every element of its different social and economic strands. The white subject becomes an individual by virtue of her or his specific position in this web. Left outside of some its strands, more heavily enmeshed in others, the black subject becomes something else, something both more and less. This something else is what Spillers refers to as the “one.” In her attempt to bend the protocols of psychoanalysis in ways that make it accountable to the distinctive shape and movement of the racialized subject, Spillers undoes the assumed structural necessity of any particular form of subjectivity. Individuality is one form of subjectivity, but there are others, and each one is heavily entangled in its constitutive social and economic milieu.
This last fact is made compellingly clear in The Autobiography. Johnson moves his narrator into and out of a number of clearly drawn socioeconomic milieus, and in each the narrator takes on a markedly different shape. The Ex-Coloured Man is a bit of a sponge; his high sensitivity to his surroundings allows Johnson to deliver a series of case studies about the way in which social and economic relations move in and through the narrator. The narrator’s life as a “coloured” man includes stints as a gambler, as a reader in a cigar factory, as a ragtime performer, as a composer, and as a student. In each situation the narrator stages himself differently, and in each situation his cathexis by the social and economic forces that surround him gives his subjectivity a different form. In his depiction of each of the narrator’s incarnations, Johnson depicts race as the mode through which social forces cathect the subject, and subjectivity is presented as a coagulation of social forces that can take many shapes.21 Each episode is an argument against individuality as the exclusive form that subjectivity can take, and each is an argument against individuality conceived as a “subjectivity hermetically sealed off from other informing discourses and practices.”22
When Johnson and Spillers foreground the historically determined nature of subjectivity, they work to denaturalize individuality, but they do something more as well. In Johnson’s literary account of the narrator’s racialized schooling in repetition and in Spillers’s theoretical account of the subject formed by repetition and division, one can see the outline of a different form of subjectivity, one that is not just a fractured or lacerated version of individuality but that also has its own set of possibilities, limitations, and productivities. Spillers refers to this other, racialized form of subjectivity as the “one”; she distinguishes it from individuality on the basis of repetition, reflexivity, and collectivity. The one is not totally distinct from the individual, but it is a configuration that posits a different relationship to the repetitive nature of the present and to the speculative energies that tie the present to the future.
Spillers describes the “one” in ways that extend her insights about the repetitive nature of the racialized subject’s relationship to linguistic utterance and social positionality: the one is “a structure in this instance: the small integrity of the now that accumulates the tense of the present as proofs of the past that would warrant, might earn, the future.”23 Here, the racialized subject’s relationship to repetition takes on a more positive valence. The “now” that defines the one necessarily occurs over and over again, and it is through its repetition that the one can accumulate the energies that gain it access to a beneficial future. Unlike the individual, the one does not permanently link itself to a stable, discursive identity. It repetitively stages itself in recognition of the antiphonal relationship between itself and its surroundings. Its familiarity with language as prohibition makes the one aware of the divide between the speaking I and the spoken I and capable of manipulating this divide. Standing apart from the fictional integrity of the individual, the one knows that its utterances are not linked to it by the bonds of ownership and possession but that they are performative gambits working to create a space for the subject in the shifting and contradictory terrain of the social world.24 The individual assumes a stable platform for identity and a broad integrity of the now that link the past, present, and future in a structure of necessity and continuity. The one insists in and on the “small integrity of the now” as the momentary point of enunciation in which the speaking I repetitively launches an articulation of itself (the spoken I) into the world.
The one stages itself in the “small integrity of the now” every time it speaks itself against the sounding board of the social world; it accumulates the “tense of the present” when its utterances echo off this sounding board and earn for it a reflexive knowledge. The repetitions of these echoes are cumulative and help the one earn knowledge of how its utterances are received in a complexly reflexive social world. Just as skilled ragtime or stride piano players’ repetition of the same piece can help them anticipate how their specific musical utterances will be responded to by dancers and listeners, so can the one earn a reflexive knowledge of how its uttered articulations of its own needs, desires, and claims for recognition will be received by interlocutors in the realm of social discourse.
For Spillers, the way the one accommodates itself to a world of repetition is one of its most productive strengths, the source of its reflexive knowledge of language and of its own structure as well as a strategy closely aligned with the one’s collective properties. Repetition is a defining attribute of the one, and in her allusions to the music of Charles Mingus, Spillers suggests an affinity between African American music’s treatment of repetition and the shape of racialized subjectivity. This is a connection more overtly made by the critic James Snead. His article “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” describes a forthright confrontation with the vicissitudes of repetition as the defining element of black culture, of black music, and—implicitly—of the subject aligned with both. Snead posits the centrality of repetition as an inescapable fact of the social and natural world. For him, culture is a technology that social collectivities use to either confront or evade the facts of repetition. The distinction he makes between cultures that engage repetition and cultures that evade it lines up with Spillers’s distinction between the one and the individual and with Johnson’s distinction between his narrator’s temporal shape as a “coloured” man and as an “ex-coloured” man. Like Johnson and Spillers, Snead shows the way a sophisticated treatment of repetition gives the African American subject productive possibilities unavailable to any subjective or social formation that evades the centrality of repetition.25
Snead’s insights about repetition are important not only because they help to elaborate the significance Johnson and Spillers assign to repetition but because his approach gives a clear indication of the importance of musical treatments of repetition in Johnson’s text and of the way these treatments are linked to structures of subjectivity that have a powerfully collective component. Snead uses musical and literary examples to theorize the way repetition works in black culture. He shows how the performance strategies of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and James Brown exemplify a set of philosophical insights into the relationship between repetition and social life. He also shows that the complex dialogic interactions enabled by these performers’ treatment of repetition exemplify the kind of subjective and social interactions possible in cultures and social structures that foreground repetition. The participatory, improvisational, and egalitarian impulse in jazz and other forms of African American music depends on the necessary relationship between repetition and any robustly collective social formation.
Snead demonstrates the collective implications of African American music, and this is something that Johnson shows as well in his depiction of the social spaces of ragtime performance and, even more clearly, in his account of the powerful community feeling generated by the repetitive and antiphonal performance practices of a religious revival meeting that the narrator attends in the South. This last is the “Camp Meeting,” a space in which the musical mastery of Singing Johnson creates an intense experience of social affiliation and collective identity. Johnson’s account emphasizes the role of repetition at the camp meeting in creating a set of collective affiliations that bind its participants together. Even though it is made up of “people from different communities,” the congregation at this meeting responds to both the singing and the preaching “with the precision of a company of well-drilled soldiers” (The Autobiography, 176). The interactions of the congregation with the preacher, John Brown, and the singing leader, Singing Johnson, are a model of well-coordinated, participatory social form. These interactions and the collectivity they generate depend on repetition: when Singing Johnson sings the leading lines of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the author of The Autobiography provides the repetitive response of the congregation.26 The congregation marks the moving point of collective enunciation with a line that is repeated four times—“Coming for to carry me home,” the last repetition of which is marked by an ellipsis indicating the open-ended and ongoing iterative performance of social coordination. The congregation repetitively articulates the “small integrity of the now” as the site of their collective attempt to open up this “now” to the future.
At this moment in the text, James Weldon Johnson gives a sketch of community and collectivity that is in sharp contrast with the isolating individualism of the narrator at the end of the novel. The camp meeting is the strongest of several moments that show the narrator immersed in a situation that exemplifies an important aspect of Spillers’s “one”: its collectivity. Spillers refers to this collective aspect as the one’s “iconic thickness,” its imbrication with other subjects: “the individual-in-the-mass and the mass-in-the-individual.”27 For Spillers, the individual is formed in “opposition to the mass,”28 but the one takes on an iconic thickness by way of its awareness of the social energies, rhythms, and trajectories that it shares with others. The subject as the one is thick because it is an aggregation of the social field’s thickness and density. The thick subject does not imagine itself separated from the rhythms and trajectories that pass through it and shape its milieu; at the camp meeting, part of the enthusiasm and collective effervescence is generated by a celebration of shared rhythms and by the subject’s capabilities of shaping and being shaped by these rhythms and repetitions.
At the camp meeting, the narrator is in close contact with a form of subjectivity that is collectively engaged in performing and celebrating repetitions. This subject is collective because it is repetitive. Snead stresses that “beat is an entity of relation,”29 and whether the beat is musical, linguistic, or social, the subject’s attunement to the beating repetitions of its lifeworld makes it aware of its dependence on repetitive rhythms generated by others. Snead points to the way that “one rhythm always defines another in black music” as an example of how an attentiveness to repetition militates for collectivity and interdependence.30
Repetition also facilitates collective participation by the way it constantly makes available a starting or entry point that is either happening right now or that is about to be repeated again. Snead refers to this as the performance of a “beat that is there to pick up,” a pattern of repetition that is “amenable to restarting, interruption, or entry” by other members of a musical or social ensemble.31 When music or cultures are repetitive, they are more open to participation by all members. Because repetition creates a certain kind of regularity that is easy to anticipate, and because repetition is aligned with starting over and returning to beginnings, it creates a movement that any participant can join. Cultures that foreground repetition make no effort to hide the fact that culture is constantly and repetitively performing itself in a movement that depends on the contributions of its members.
The connection between music and social form foregrounded by Snead and alluded to by Johnson leads to an understanding of social form itself as a performance dependent on repetition. Social form has to maintain itself; it depends on “a certain continuance in the nurture of those concepts and experiences that have helped or are helping to lend self-consciousness and awareness to a given group.”32 Snead sums up this point: “‘Culture’ . . . also means the culture of culture.”33 Culture always has to be cultured or cultivated, which means that the practices, forms, mental habits, and relations that are its constitutive elements need to be repeated. Culture performs its ongoing form by way of repetition, and any attempt to break the rhythm that racialized cultural forms use to perpetuate themselves needs to take this fact into account. This means that the strategies for managing and harnessing repetition that show up in Johnson’s novel are not just technologies for shaping and reshaping the self but contain important strategies for transforming and reforming the social world. This is how Johnson presents repetition in his novel: not as something one can choose to use or not use, but as an ineluctable force of social life that can be used to either constrain or unfetter the subject.
Repetition is an inescapable component of every form of subjectivity, and Johnson attests to this fact by the way his novel ends. On the last page, the narrator affirms his commitment to his current life as a white subject secure from the need to repeat or restart. He claims a freedom from any “desir[e] to be otherwise,” but this complacent freedom is disturbed by an “and yet” that announces the disruptive presence of repetition: “and yet, when I sometimes open . . .” At those repeated moments in which he opens up the box containing the remnants of his classical composition on “Negro themes,” he confronts his “dead ambition” and realizes that in taking up his life as a white man he has acquiesced to the racial regime working to thwart African American futurity.
When the Ex-Coloured Man “sometimes” opens the lid of his repressed past, he is repetitively called back to a series of alternative futures that do not eschew repetition. He feels the repetitive calls of his “dead ambition” and “vanished dream,” the calls of access to a future that do not depend on any social or psychic investment in whiteness. These repetitive interruptions of his stable, white present call him back to an experience of repetition that might earn or warrant access to a different future, one in which race is not a force that cuts the subject off from valuable psychic resources but functions as the positive condition of a more capacious treatment of social and psychic energies. In the ending’s conjugation of repetition with traces of an alternative mode of futurity, The Autobiography suggests the possibility of social and subjective formations that couple the productivities of repetition with access to a speculative future that is something more and something other than a hopeless repetition of the past and the present.
1. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1927; rpt., New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 146, 148. This essay uses the 1960 Hill and Wang edition of The Autobiography, in which Arna Bontemps’s introduction asserts that the book feels “as if [it] had been written this year.” In addition to Bontemps’s introduction, this version also includes the 1927 edition’s British spelling and authorial attribution and the novel’s original 1912 preface. Bearing the marks of the 1912, 1927, and 1960 iterations, this edition highlights the complexity of the novel’s ongoing engagement with different historical contexts and foregrounds the novel’s rich treatment of repetition, the subject of my essay. Future references to this work are given parenthetically in the text.
2. Johnson is clear about this in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry: “The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art” (Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931], 9).
3. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845; rpt., New York: Penguin, 1986), 139.
4. See Tayyab Mahmud, “Debt and Discipline,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012), esp. 477–79.
5. Frantz Fanon writes: “Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann [New York: Grove, 1967], 14–15). See also Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).
6. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); and Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
7. Paul Ricoeur calls the novel “a prodigious workshop for experiments in the . . . expression of time” in Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2:8.
8. For a thoroughgoing account of the role of repetition in psychic structures, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 2.
9. The literature on the speculative or futural dimension of subjectivity is vast, but three important texts are Heidegger’s Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989); and Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). The particular way in which Johnson’s narrator renders himself speculative by “forsaking” the past (The Autobiography, 190) and “den[ying]” the present (195) makes Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Frankfurt school appropriations of it particularly relevant. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1961); and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 2.
10. I am not making an argument about any kind of natural connection between repetition and African American existence. What I am arguing is that all cultures and all forms of subjectivity depend on repetition. Johnson’s novel exposes some of the historical coordinates contributing to the distinctive weight that repetition has come to have in economies of African American existence. For a critique of formations that posit a “natural” link between race and repetition, see Ronald Radano’s “Hot Fantasies: American Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Radano and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See also Saidiya Hartman’s account of the relationship between repetition and African American experience in the nineteenth century: Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 49–78 (esp. 76).
11. Elsewhere, I have argued that the narrator’s successive engagements with improvised ragtime and classical music are indexes of his engagement with different forms of temporality. Part of the richness of Johnson’s novel is its examination of the ways in which all the different layers—aesthetic, economic, ideological—of U.S. social formations participate in shaping race and time. See Barnhart, “Chronopolitics and Race: Rag-time and Symphonic Time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” African American Review 40, no. 3 (2006): 551–69.
12. For a compelling historical and theoretical reading of the links between racial distinction and the assignment of economic positions, see Lindon Barrett, “Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason,” in Accelerating Possession, ed. Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), esp. 106.
13. For an account of the ways in which the legal system enforces whiteness as a privileged relationship to the future (in the form of “reasonable expectation”), see Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 276–91.
14. Hortense Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Boundary 2 23, no. 3 (1996): 108.
15. I follow Spillers in referring to the subject position of people of color as “racialized.” This does tend to suggest that the white subject is not racialized; however, implicit in my argument is the belief that the white subject is racialized, only in ways that are not as overt and that tend to present whiteness as racelessness.
16. “I believe it to be a fact that the coloured people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them” (The Autobiography, 22).
17. Spillers, “All the Things,” 95.
18. Ibid., 101.
19. Although Lacan did not discuss issues of race, there is a growing body of work that uses a Lacanian framework to address these issues. See Arlene Keizer, “African American Literature and Psychoanalysis,” in A Companion to African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Mikko Tukhanen, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000).
20. Spillers, “All the Things,” 92.
21. Stuart Hall writes, “Race is the modality in which class is lived,” in “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Macmillan, 1978), 394.
22. Spillers, “All the Things,” 103.
23. Ibid., 102.
24. I use the word “performative” in an attempt to do justice to the rich connections Johnson’s novel suggests between his narrator’s struggles with identity and the performance strategies of African American music. I do not use it to suggest that any individual or subject can easily “choose” to perform or not perform race. This last is a view critiqued by Johnson: he puts a similar view in the mouth of the narrator’s patron, and the narrator’s lament over his “sacrificed” past belies any facile notions of race as “mere” performance. For a theorization of race that takes full account of both its unremitting fixity and its performative dimension, see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
25. James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). For Snead, the chief virtue of black culture’s stance toward repetition lies in the way it utilizes the powers of social imbrication, relationality, and improvisation.
26. Jeffrey Nealon writes, “In the blues tradition, of course, repetition with a difference is linked to the structure of call and response” (Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998], 125). See also Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1970; rpt., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 27.
27. Spillers, “All the Things,” 101.
28. Ibid., 100.
29. Snead, “Repetition,” 75.
30. Ibid., 68.
31. Ibid., 71.
32. Ibid., 63.
33. Ibid.