Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era

6 / The Practice of Hip-to-macy in the Age of Public Diplomacy: Richard Wright’s Indonesian Travels

6 / The Practice of Hip-to-macy in the Age of Public Diplomacy: Richard Wright’s Indonesian Travels During James Weldon Johnson’s early twentieth-century work in Venezuela , he added a new dimension to his role as a consul. His primary duties involved aiding US sailors and facilitating trade between Venezuela and US wholesale houses, but on his own initiative, he helped organize two Venezuelan baseball clubs. In some ways, organizing baseball teams was a creative answer to Johnson’s commercial duties: it spurred “an order for complete outfits from a New York sporting goods house.” But to Johnson’s mind, the emergence of baseball teams in Venezuela had ideological implications extending beyond standard diplomatic protocol. “When I left Puerto Cabello,” he recalled in his autobiography, “there were indications that our national game was gaining a foothold in that section of Venezuela” (Along 249). Through the ambiguous phrase national game, Johnson intimated his sense that deploying US culture could generate goodwill and hence promote US regional influence. Johnson’s foray into baseball diplomacy fell outside the era’s diplomatic norms. During the early twentieth century, diplomacy was conceived of as an activity carried out on a government-to-government basis, and attempts at influencing foreign publics on a cultural level were seen as undiplomatic.1 Much has changed since then. With the Second World War, the United States recognized the importance of strategically deploying its culture as a means of predisposing foreign publics toward US foreign policy. During the past half century, such cultural deployments have been known as public diplomacy, and in recent years, Joseph Nye has discussed US cultural influence across the globe as a major hip-to-macy in the age of public diplomacy / 147 component of the nation’s soft power, or its ability to use the attraction of its “culture and ideology” to achieve its geopolitical ambitions (10).2 Some of the United States’ conspicuous and enduring public diplomacy initiatives have been the Fulbright exchange program, the Voice of America radio broadcasts, and the maintenance of free lending libraries serving populations outside the United States. Whether public diplomacy initiatives have been conspicuous and enduring or discreet and ephemeral, black US culture and citizens have played major roles in US efforts to generate soft power. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, certain US officials began recognizing that the country’s dismal record in domestic race relations was becoming an Achilles heel as the nation wrestled with the Soviet Union in an international system increasingly accountable to decolonization and anticolonial sentiment.3 In response, the United States’ overwhelmingly white diplomatic apparatus developed what I term hipster diplomacy. To borrow language from Norman Mailer’s often troubling account of hipsterism in the 1950s, this was a “postwar generation” of US diplomacy dominated by white officials but drawing on “the source of Hip”—“the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries” (340). Consistent with Mailer’s description of hipsterism, hipster diplomacy absorbed African American performances and performance practices (341). It operated under an assumption that “the Negro’s experience,” which derives authority from years of “tortured senses,” might be “the most universal communication” that the West could offer the planet’s reeling postwar populations (364). Hipster diplomacy had various instantiations. The Cold War State Department orchestrated the Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and European travels of “Jazz Ambassadors ” such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. In the late 1950s, African American contralto Marian Anderson traveled and sang throughout Asia as a US “Goodwill Ambassador.” During this era, the United States Information Agency (USIA) distributed thousands of radios to Asian, African, and Middle Eastern populations and then made jazz a prominent feature on its Voice of America radio broadcasts . And in 1962, Langston Hughes read his famous poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at the opening of the USIA’s free lending library in Accra, Ghana. During his presentation, Hughes observed that “America has often fallen far short of . . . her basic dreams,” but he maintained that these American dreams were nonetheless “always seeking” and “sometimes finding . . . expression” (“American” 1).4 In arranging for Hughes and Satchmo to perform as unofficial cultural representatives abroad, 148 / hip-to-macy the United States was working to democratize its international face by reconscripting the antihierarchical practices that earlier black internationalists innovated as they drew on and departed from official internationalism...