The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion

Chapter 4. Annexation in the Pacific and Asian Conspiracy in Central America in James Weldon Johnson’s Unproduced Operettas

96 • Chapter four Annexation in the Pacific and Asian Conspiracy in Central America in James Weldon Johnson’s Unproduced Operettas I read the autobiography you sent me and was much impressed with it. Ugh! There is not any more puzzling a problem in this country than the problem of color. It is not as urgent, or as menacing, as other problems, but it seems the more utterly insoluble. The trouble is that the conflict in many of its phases is not between right and wrong but between two rights. —Theodore Roosevelt (to Brander Matthews) on The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [T]he fear that lies closest to [the heart of the Latin American] is not that southern republics will lose their independence to the United States, but that they will fall under the bane of American prejudice, a process which he has without a doubt, observed going on slowly but surely in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Panama. —James Weldon Johnson, “Why Latin-America Dislikes the United States” In Afro-Orientalism, Bill V. Mullen contends that U.S. black engagement with Asia began with a series of articles W. E. B. Du Bois published in the Crisis; however, as established in chapter 3 and confirmed in the ensuing discussions of James Weldon Johnson’s libretti for operettas dating from 1899, it occurred earlier in the context of and in response to the U.S. policy of overseas expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990s, considerable Annexation in Johnson’s Operettas 97 critical attention has been devoted to the relationship between U.S. cultural productions and imperialism. More recently, scholars have begun to address the transnational and hemispheric implications of U.S. black literary texts. Given these trends, it is not surprising that Johnson, a major literary figure as well as a prominent race activist, who worked for six years as a U.S. diplomat in Latin America and whose literary and nonliterary texts explicitly and implicitly address expansion and its connection to race relations at home, has been one of the few African American writers whose views on and links to U.S. imperialism have been the subject of scholarly scrutiny. At roughly the same time that critics have begun to pursue this line of inquiry in connection with Johnson, a new book has directed long overdue attention to his theatrical work. Focusing on The Shoo-Fly Regiment and The Red Moon, two pioneering Broadway shows written and produced by Cole and Johnson (one of two names— the other being Cole and Johnson Brothers—used for the partnership comprising James Weldon Johnson, his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole), Paula Marie Seniors’s Beyond “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater (2009) contextualizes and argues for the significance of the team’s productions, particularly their pathbreaking depictions of African American college students and soldiers. In “The Ever Expanding South: James Weldon Johnson and the Rhetoric of the Global Color Line” (2009), Amanda M. Page accurately states that the influence of Latin Americans within and outside of the United States on Johnson “ultimately reveals the interconnectedness of domestic and international struggles for equal rights and the limitations of applying a binary framework (whether black/white or North/South) to a much more complex reality” (41). It should be noted, however, that Page’s list of binaries does not include proimperialism /anti-imperialism, an opposition dominating her own and other scholars ’ recent treatments of Johnson. Let me be clear: it is not that we should avoid addressing imperialism in connection with African American writers—on the contrary, one of the arguments of this book is that there has been far too little attention to the subject. It’s that simply classifying authors or their writings as either proimperialist or anti-imperialist fails to account sufficiently for the complexities of the text, the writer, and the era. Even though he wrote or cowrote several texts set abroad that concern U.S. imperialism, recent readings of Johnson by Page, Harilaos Stecopoulos, and Brian Russell Roberts have focused on his lone novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, originally published in 1912 (although portions of it were written in New York prior to 1906) 98 Chapter Four and on Johnson’s consular service in Venezuela and Nicaragua. As Page and Stecopoulos point out (and I note...