Tag: James Weldon Johnson

  • Race Passing and American Individualism University of Massachusetts Press February 2003 176 pages Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand) Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for…

  • Ambiguity and the Ethics of Reading Race and Lynching in James W. Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1912) Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS) Volume 10 (2009) ISSN: 1861-6127 Carmen Dexl University of Erlangen James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) discusses the causes, conditions, and implications of…

  • The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination Peter Lang Publishing Group 2004 198 pages ISBN: 978-0-8204-6206-6 Carlyle Van Thompson, Acting Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York The Tragic Black Buck examines the phenomenon, often paradoxical, of black males passing for white…

  • As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in “The Souls of Black Folk,” the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms…