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Chapter Four. Finding Freedom in Sameness: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
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Chapter Four Finding Freedom in Sameness Ja mes Weldon Johnson’ s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Today, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is defined as an archetypal text in the canon of African American literature. The positioning of The Autobiography as a pivotal canonical text did not happen in 1912 when it was published anonymously, or in 1927 when it was reissued bearing Johnson’s name, but in the 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of African American studies and the rise of mainstream, elite/middle-class African American critics in predominantly white American colleges and universities that brought with them the inevitable need to reinvent the canon of African American literature. Although it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that The Autobiography became a pivotal canonical text, it was defined as a seminal and original African American text after its 1927 reissue. It was defined as a text that captured the black experience, that embodied the essence of the African American struggle for racial equality, and that manifested the race problem in the United States. The interesting questions I have about Johnson’s The Autobiography, questions I will attempt to answer in this chapter, are: As an archetypal, canonical African American text, how is it represented politically and culturally? How does it function aesthetically, socially, and politically? Whose class interest does it serve?1 As a pivotal text that draws all African American texts around it, that embodies everything that comes before it, and that signifies everything that comes after it, The Autobiography becomes a center, a graspable essence, of African American literature. It allows elite/middle-class Christian African American and 67 mainstream American critics to establish among successive African American literary texts a community of meanings, symbolic links, or an interplay of resemblance and reflection. It becomes the vortex, engaging “the interconnections of [African American] history and conditions with the life history of the individual ” (V. Smith 44). As a center by which African American literary texts are defined in terms of their relation to it, The Autobiography allows African American critics to master African American literature, to master the African American experience. But this mastery also allows for a reduction in the differences within African American literature and life. It allows for the repression of the polyvalent nature of this literature and life. I want to examine The Autobiography, this pivotal, archetypal text in the 1970s/1980s reinvented canon of African American literature, in terms of the white/black binary of signification that defines white as normative and superior and that represents black as victim, devalued Other, or as the Same. Both as an original and seminal African American text and as the pivotal text in this 1970s/1980s reinvented canon, how did it become the “epitome of the race situation in the United States” (Fauset 38)? How is it a “composite autobiography of the Negro race in the United States in modern times” (Van Vechten xxxiv)? How does The Autobiography embody the “key tropes which form the AfroAmerican tradition” (Stepto 96)? What does The Autobiography reveal of “the mind of the Negro” (Collier 365)? How is it an “inclusive survey of racial accomplishments and traits” (Van Vechten xxxiii)? How does the plight of the “tragic mulatto” symbolize/define African American life (Baker, Singers 22)? The Autobiography interconnects what African American“racial history and conditions with the life of the individual” (V. Smith 44)? How does it construct African American life? What construction of African American life does it privilege? Finally, does it reproduce or disrupt the white/black binary? The Autobiography is an archetypal African American text because it is informed by and reproduces the ideology of the African American sociopolitical mission of racial uplift and the white/black binary of signification. It defines the journey from the African American subaltern to the middle-class, Christian, Protestant work ethic values, conventions, and definitions of mainstream American society as the African American experience and the African American literary tradition. In this instance, it embodies the sociopolitical mission of racial uplift—the main tenet of elite/middle-class Christian African Americans. It also protests against mainstream society for not accepting the African American. Finally, The Autobiography represses and subordinates the African American subaltern. Written as an autobiography echoing earlier slave autobiographies, The Autobiography is a first-person retrospective narrative of an “ex-coloured man.” He is born in Georgia to a prominent, wealthy white man and a light...