In the following essay, Robert Stepto returns to his pathbreaking monograph of African American narrative traditions, From behind the Veil (1979), which firmly established the major tropes of racial literacy, ascent and immersion, and authorial control in works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American authors. That was “the call.” His chapter “Lost in a Quest: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” occupies a special place in that work, initiating the second half of his study. It commences “the response” to this series of racial rhetorics, or tropes, in the writing of racial forebears. The authors James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, Stepto argues, revoice and intentionally alter these tropes, creating new narrative forms in the process of responding to prior texts. Stepto demonstrates an interwoven and at times secretive narrative conversation that has taken place within African American literature as it has unfolded over time between two significant periods in African American experience and authorship.
The essay included in this collection was originally delivered as part of the 2009 W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture Series at Harvard University. Stepto discusses several scenes of racial education, both fictional and autobiographical, from major works by twentieth-century African American authors: Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The “search for race” involves the recognition and navigation of racial tropes by subjects who find themselves made into objects at the center of the racial lesson. Tracing the writers’ authority dramatized in these works—not only through the racialization depicted but also through the differentiation created by the authors, who are distinct from their subjects—Stepto shows the navigation of the autobiographical form as a means of possibility for Johnson, Du Bois, Hurston, and Obama. Placed in a broader discursive context of American autobiography, Stepto shows, these works more effectively convey “identities assumed and identities imposed” and register the giving and receiving of “gifts”—the interracial sharing of this understanding of ourselves.
In his preface to the second edition of From behind the Veil (1991), Stepto wrote, “Veil studies how freedom occasions literacy and how, even more impressively, literacy initiates freedom. In the process the point is made that reading and writing are empowering activities for African Americans (among others), that they have always been so, and that our writers have always written about such activities—fantasized about them, even. Obviously this is a productive line of inquiry for me personally. . . . But there must be a public benefit as well: the public needs to be reminded (far more than I do) that an African American written culture exists and endures” (x–xi). Setting out to write his lectures in 2008–9, Stepto knew that “there was a project to pursue that involved being attentive to how we read African American literature at the present moment, knowing, and actually being stunned by the fact, that an African American writer is our president.”1 Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Stepto shows, occupies an important position in this consideration of African American narrative’s interventions in American autobiography—indeed, its interventions in the biography of America. —NM
1. Robert Stepto, A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3.