Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual

Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual By Ross Posnock. Harvard University Press, 1998

Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History By Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Cambridge University Press, 1998

Africa is still chained to Europe, and exploited by Europe, and Europe and America are chained together; and as long as this is so, it is hard to speak of Africa except as a cradle and a potential.

James Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket"

Reading Ross Posnock's Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual in relation to Wilson Jeremiah Moses's Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History requires coming to terms with both writers' insistence that categories generally understood as mutually exclusive--black and intellectual, Afrocentrism and cosmopolitanism--are so intimately intertwined as to make them indistinguishable. Posnock's refreshing critique of the idea that the black intellectual is a new and peculiar phenomenon gains much of its force from his careful unpacking of American intellectual genealogies. He reminds us that the concept of the intellectual was transplanted from Europe into America largely via the efforts of twentieth-century black writers, particularly W. E. B. Du Bois, to produce the self-consciously politicized intellectualism on display during the Dreyfus Affair. Like Posnock, Moses insists that we look to a much longer process, one that has its roots deep in the cultural and social history of both Europe and America, to understand the intellectual tendencies and traditions loosely grouped under the rubric of Afrocentrism. Specifically, he reiterates a previously made, but never fully appreciated, observation that not only have many of the central figures of Afrocentrism been self-identified as European or Euro-American (Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, Bronislaw Malinowski) but that a significant portion might be properly understood to have been apologists for both racial segregation and slavery (Johann Gottfried Herder, Arthur De Gobineau, Robert Park).

In making these claims, Posnock and Moses regularly return to the question of the mulatto. Posnock expends considerable energies trying to make sense of the articulation of mulatto status by "black" intellectuals such as Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and more recently Samuel Delany and Adrian Kennedy, while Moses paints a picture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black intellectualism that presents the broadly grinning face of white "benefactors" at almost every turn. The mulatto becomes, then, an actual impediment in the production of a black intellectual history. Frederick Douglass, Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Alain Locke, Booker T. Washington, and a host of other black writers, educators, and political activists could have been--and often were--identified as mulatto at least until 1920, when the category was dropped from the American census. The notion of black intellectualism, as articulated by Posnock and Moses, begs the question of whether there can be a black intellectualism, including Afrocentrism, that is not already a mulatto intellectualism.

Both men's work radically reconfigures black American intellectual genealogies, such that the 1920s become not so much a moment in which black intellectuals come to recognize the essential Africanness of their culture, but instead one in which black intellectuals in concert with white social scientists begin the very difficult cultural and social work of erasing the distinction between black and mulatto and rigidifying the distinction between the purely black and the wholly white. This idea, which is suggested forcefully in the work of both scholars, is compelling because it disallows the still widely held notion that black intellectual movements such as the Harlem Renaissance represent a return to a black and African originality that somehow had been lost by earlier generations of black Americans. Specifically, this radical idea insists that the expression of black identity, even putatively Afrocentric expression, was always a cosmopolitan (that is to say, interracial, transnational) affair.

Indeed, one of the more startling implications of Posnock's and Moses's work is that cosmopolitanism, even as it is prescribed as an anecdote to feverishly parochial concepts of...