Mixed Race Studies

New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ed. by Noelle Morrissette (review)

African American Review
Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2018
pages 344-346
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2018.0049

Masami Sugimori, Associate Professor of American Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, Florida

Ed. Noelle Morrissette. New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2017. 272 pp. $59.95.

More than a century after its initial publication in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson continues to generate commentary. The narrator’s racial passing, along with the novel’s twist of genre through “passing” for an autobiography, has led much scholarship to address the issues of race and narrative. At the same time, with the advent and development of new critical and theoretical approaches, more and more topics (pertaining to the literary climate around Johnson’s composition, the novel’s intertextuality with other works both within and outside of the era, and the sociocultural contexts of the early twentieth-century U. S., to name just a few) have arisen and enriched our inquiry. Meanwhile, the novel itself has gone through numerous editions—including, but not limited to, those published by Alfred A. Knopf (1927), New American Library (1948), Vintage (1989), Penguin Books (1990), Library of America (2004), and recently, by W. W. Norton as a Critical Edition (2015)—which attest to its increasingly canonical status in American literature. New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—the first critical anthology devoted entirely to the novel—is a timely addition to this evolution of Johnson scholarship and readership, featuring both established and innovative strategies for analysis and interpretation.

Editor Noelle Morrissette’s Introduction defines New Perspectives as a product of the ongoing critical history of The Autobiography, on the one hand, and as an embodiment of the “futurity” that explicitly or implicitly informs the novel, on the other. While offering “new perspectives” in their respective ways, the essays in this collection attend productively to the accumulated scholarship that Morrissette surveys in terms of topical trends: Johnson’s authorial achievements and the novel’s documentary values (1960s and ’70s); its intertextuality with African American narratives (late 1970s and early ’80s); modernity, modernism, and racial identity (1990s); and transnationalism, performativity, music, and sound (since 2000). These essays also share an emphasis on the visions of the future Johnson embedded in the novel—not only as an extension of his careful assessment of the contemporary U. S., but also in his resistance to the nation’s racial regime, which denied blacks a legitimate history or a sense of teleological progression in time. Thus, Morrissette designs her anthology to conduct “a reassessment of the author’s writing and legacy and the racial futurity he called for, to which we continue to respond” (15).

These guiding principles also account for the section organization of New Perspectives, with its ten chapters and an Afterword assigned to four parts according to topical focuses. The three essays in part one, “Cultures of Reading, Cultures of Writing: Canons and Authenticity,” examine Johnson’s complex relationship with “cultural” parameters surrounding his composition: white mentor Brander Matthews’s theory of modern American fiction (Lawrence J. Oliver); the early twentieth-century African American literary scene (Michael Nowlin); and the novel’s “reliably unreliable” white readers (Jeff Karem 67). Each of these relationships consists of transactional negotiation rather than one-way influence. Through careful analysis of Johnson’s œuvre and correspondence, for example, Nowlin reveals that the author’s acute sense of African American literary destitution underlies the way he framed The Autobiography—both in its anonymous publication in 1912 and in the 1927 republication marketed as “a classic in Negro literature” (49)—which went in tandem with his strenuous promotion of other black writers to establish a legitimate and well-recognized African American literary tradition.

Part two, “Relational Tropes: Transnationalism, Futurity, and the Ex-Colored Man,” features three essays on the transnational and transhistorical potential of, and exploration in, The Autobiography. Diana Paulin compares the novel with Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, and Daphne Lamothe does so with Teju Cole’s Open City, to reveal the “futurity” that Johnson’s work posits in the form, respectively, of…

Read or purchase the review here.

The Language Trap: U.S. Passing Fiction and its Paradox

University of Kansas
2009
181 pages

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Through exploration of William Faulkner’s, James Weldon Johnson’s and Nella Larsen’s “passing novels,” this dissertation points out that narrative representation of racial passing facilitates and compromises the authors’ challenge to the white-dominant ideology of early-twentieth-century America. I reveal that, due to their inevitable dependence on language, these authors draw paradoxically on the white-dominant ideology that they aim to question, especially its system of binary racial categorization. While the “white” body of a “passing” character serves the novelists as a subversive force in white-supremacist society (which depends on the racial other to define “whiteness”), language, which is essentially ideological, traps the writers in racial binary and continually suggests that, while the character looks white, s/he is really black. Accordingly, the authors have to write under the constraints of the problem that American discourse of race must and, for the most part, does systematically suppress its own essential fictiveness.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Passing Paradox: Representing Racial Chaos within the Symbolic Order
• Chapter 1: Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
• Chapter 2: Signifying, Ordering, and Containing the Chaos: Whiteness, Ideology, and Language in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
• Chapter 3: Narrative Order and Racial Hierarchy: James Weldon Johnson’s Double-Consciousness and “White” Subjectivity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Along This Way
• Chapter 4: Ordering the Racial Chaos, Chaoticizing the Racial Order: Nella Larsen’s Narrative of Indeterminacy and Invisibility in Passing
• Conclusion: Toward a Language for the Real, Chaotic and Unnamable
• Notes
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

Narrative Order, Racial Hierarchy, and “White” Discourse in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Along This Way

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2011
page 37-62
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2011.0041

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

African Americans became increasingly mobile during the early twentieth century, as exemplified by the Great Migration that began around 1910. Reflecting the general anxiety about such racial mobility, the March 2, 1911, issue of The Independent included an article about racial passing, “When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian?” Referring to the downfall of a “white” family whose part-black ancestry, unknown even to themselves, accidentally became public, the anonymous author discusses the “stupidity” and “cruelty” of the one-drop law and advises “all white negroes” to leave the South and live as “white people” so that, “as the bleaching process goes on, the conundrum will cease to concern them, When is a Caucasian not a Caucasian?” Despite the author’s insight into the precarious nature of racial categories, the article’s logic is predicated on the assumption of stable whiteness. On the one hand, along with its title, the article’s rhetorical question “Who knows where . . . it [the family’s tragedy] may strike next?” emphasizes that any white person can really be nonwhite. On the other hand, to highlight the “stupidity” and “cruelty” of white supremacy, the writer must posit an unquestionably pure-white man as the society’s representative. Thus, concerning the husband who annulled his marriage to an unwitting passer under Louisiana’s “infamous law against intermarriage,” the article states that “[t]here was no question that he was a full Caucasian” (479) despite its ongoing claim of the endless questionability of pure whiteness.

One finds such simultaneous refutation and affirmation of clear-cut racial classification in James Weldon Johnson’s novel about passing published a year later, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). As Samira Kawash points out. the novel’s scrutiny of the racial binary even problematizes “the simple black passing for white’ logic of passing . . . and its attendant model of race as the expression of a prior, embodied identity,” so that the “Ex-Coloured Man’s relation to blackness is shown…

Racial mixture, racial passing, and white subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

The Faulkner Journal
Volume 23, Issue 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 3-22

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

In his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd Engler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Absalom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Somewhat testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the interconnection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white-looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention.

Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor,  Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s identity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship. (1) For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their pre-Civil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle… The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608)…

Read the entire article here.