In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

150 black NewYork and the black theaterand arts, functions simultaneously as Johnson’s preliminary autobiography, predating the publication of Along This Way by just three years. The two works were composed at the same time and subjected to a gradual process of distinguishing the one from the other. One of the most telling indications of this process can be found in Johnson’s manuscript notes for Along This Way, where Johnson writes: “[Marcus] Garvey—NY or Autobiography?”1 Garvey would be placed tidily in Johnson’s Black Manhattan, not in his autobiography , distancing the leader and his persistent criticisms of Johnson and the NAACP from the author’s most intimate portrait. Black Manhattan functions as a monumental history of black culture emanating from New York from the period of Dutch settlement and British imperialism predating the American nation through to the book’s post–Harlem Renaissance moment of publication. Black Manhattan also locates Johnson’s presence within this narrative as a wellknown personality who had, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “helped to make [Negro art]” and “was personally acquainted with its chief characters.” Johnson, as Du Bois pointed out in his review of the work, “furnished the lyrics to many popular songs and the literary flavor to some of the plays. He was part of that first climax of Negro art in New York.”2 But the author’s delivery of this material is oddly distant and ambiguously framed. First, Johnson refers to himself in the third person throughout the text when he mentions his name at all, resulting in what appears to be a kind of disembodiment or even erasure.3 Second, he employs two different voices: the outside spectator who enunciates 7 from noun to verb Black phonographic voice in Black Manhattan I feel too . . . that the narrative does achieve living continuity; that it moves, and that in parts of it there is dramatic power and even poetry. —James Weldon Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, on Black Manhattan Black Manhattan (1930), Johnson’s social history of f r O m N O u N t O v e r B 151 a documentary, detached voice, and the participant who is implicated in watching. Third, he goes so far as to use The Autobiography of an ExColored Man of 1912—a work that had finally been attributed to him as a novel in 1927, with its reissue—as documentation for his present work, using a novel to document a history. In recent African American literary scholarship, “phonography” has emerged as a key theoretical term when discussing issues of interpretation in relation to African American literary production. The concept is significant because it rejects the teleological relationship of orality to literacy, one that heralds literacy as the progressive end of orality.4 Phonography can account for the silences, noise, and inarticulacy that are frequently written onto African American culture but are seldom heard emanating from its authors’ works. What linksThe Autobiographyofan Ex-Colored Man and Black Manhattan may be Johnson’s understanding of his novel as a “biography of the race” that appropriately tells this performance history of blacks in New York. Indeed, the concept of performance in each work refers not just to the agents in the pages but to the works themselves: Black Manhattan and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man perform to one another, and the play between them is constitutive of a poetics of prose, of autobiographical transcription to the page. Johnson’s voice in this 1930 work might appropriately be described as “phonographic”: a voice that accommodates not only the aesthetic function of music (and, one might also add, theater) but also the function of silence and speechlessness in the complex cultural construction of both black Manhattan and the text itself—Black Manhattan. Therefore, the concept of phonography yields a key interpretation of Johnson’s narrative voice—his ambiguities and apparent ambivalences—that is especially instrumental in re-sounding this complex and neglected work. In Johnson’s works, phonography is a broad and multivalent concept encompassing multiple performative registers: the figure of the black performative body in the American theatrical world, and the enunciation and practice of an aesthetic of modern black identity. These multiple registers are delivered through a complicating narrative voice derived from the combined forms of biography and autobiography in the text. Phonography is, moreover, significant to Johnson’s autobiographies in their configuration of the writer in relation to the black diaspora. Nathaniel Mackey’s work suggests...

Share