Charles Johnson in Context

4 The Rise of the New Black Intellectual and the Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Middle Passage

157 4 The Rise of the New Black Intellectual and the Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Middle Passage The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. Karl Marx In a single town, there is no wisdom. Asante Proverb I speak as a citizen of the world. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) entered the literary marketplace at the precise moment when several scholars who were prophesying the demise of the American public intellectual were in the process of being proved stunningly incorrect. In 1987 Russell Jacoby argued in his wellknown book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe that American public intellectuals were in decline. The independent scholars of an earlier generation who wrote for a broad readership were being replaced by university professors who wrote only for other specialists : “Where the Lewis Mumfords or Walter Lippmanns wrote for a public, their successors ‘theorize’ about it at academic conferences” (xv). Credited with putting the term “public intellectual” back into contemporary circulation , Jacoby ironically provided the phrase that appeared in an avalanche of scholarly studies and popular commentary over the next two decades on the very phenomenon he had pronounced in decline: the American public intellectual .1 As he has since admitted, Jacoby had been too tied “to an obsolete model of intellectual life, privileging the old white guys and gals from the past,” to recognize the emergence of other important models of intellectual practice, in particular the unanticipated explosion of “new black public intellectuals ” on the national scene in the 1990s (xv). He confesses,“in no way did my book anticipate their appearance” (xix). While the visibility of black intellectuals was increasing in mainstream media and academic outlets at the end of the twentieth century—a group often referred to as the new black intellectuals, to distinguish their generation from the long tradition of black intellectuals who preceded them in American life—Charles Johnson was becoming increasingly visible as a national literary figure. Certainly the 1990s were propitious years for Johnson: in addition to publishing two novels, Middle Passage (1990) and Dreamer (1998), he received the National Book Award at the beginning of the decade (in 1990) and a MacArthur Award near its end (in 1998). With a Ph.D. in philosophy, a chair at a leading American university (the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship at the University of Washington ), and Guggenheim, MacArthur, and American Academy of Arts and Letters awards, Johnson is undeniably among the nation’s academic elite. Over the course of the 1990s he also became increasingly identified as a public intellectual himself. Johnson was included, for example, in American Literary History’s 1998 forum on public intellectuals, “Thinking in Public” (other participants included such figures as Richard Rorty, Charles Bernstein, Todd Gitlin, and Martha Nussbaum). Given the breadth of his written work, Johnson also fulfills the qualification for the designation “public intellectual” suggested by Steven Mailloux, who, while granting that the university is itself a distinctive type of public forum, argues that the term should be “reserved for those thinkers who directly engage with or are engaged by nonacademic publics” (144). Johnson’s fiction and prose essays do engage such audiences, as do his screenplays (including Booker), his growing contributions to Buddhist publications, and his essays for outlets such as the American Scholar, Common Quest, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Crisis (the late-twentieth-century reincarnation of the magazine established in 1910 by the NAACP). In addition, since 1977 Johnson has published over fifty reviews for well-known national and international outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times of London. Although Johnson himself finds the term “intellectual” suspect for reasons that will be examined shortly, by the 1990s he himself was widely recognized as having achieved that status. 158 c h a p t e r f o u r The social phenomenon of the new black intellectual illuminates several features of Johnson’s career and fiction. Johnson himself has long been interested in investigating the complicated position of black intellectuals through fictional re-creations of historical figures from the African American intellectual tradition (such as the Reverend Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.); through the creation...