“A Curious Study”: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Pedagogy, and the Post-Plantation Imagination

This essay analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) as a text centrally concerned with modes of reading, writing, and education. Playing with structures of self-analysis and anthropological, literary, and ethnographic modes of knowing, Johnson delivers multiple ruminations on education as an experience of shame, mystery, and oppression, while investigating institutionalized modes of critical thinking and being that transmit modes of self-mastery and self-control directly tied to modes of white mastery and taste.