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166 8 CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC “I’m the Everybody Who’s Nobody” Genealogies of the New World Slave in Paul Robeson’s Performances of the 1930s MICHELLE A. STEPHENS The Negro has not become a master. When there are no longer slaves, there are no longer masters. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks1 In 1939, after traveling for a number of years throughout Europe and Africa, the African American actor and singer Paul Robeson returned home with his family to Harlem. Almost immediately he was asked to perform the song “Ballad for Americans” in a radio broadcast that aired later that year. In his biography of Robeson, Martin Duberman describes the broadcast as “an instant sensation,” bringing Robeson a level of acclaim that mirrored his earlier rise as a concert singer of the spirituals.2 In the 1920s, however, both black and white American audiences understood Robeson to be conveying in the spirituals the racial music of the black slave. The audience’s reception of the radio performance was markedly different because now the black singer seemed able to represent the entire national community, the very embodiment of the country’s cherished political ideals. By the mid-190s, Paul Robeson’s status as a national cultural hero would be tainted by his avowed socialism and support for the Soviet regime. However , in debates concerning Robeson’s “Americanism” and the extent of his patriotism in relationship to his commitments to internationalist ideology, few discuss the specifically hemispheric dimensions of his popularity for black audiences during the first third of the twentieth century. In his signature first novel published in England in 1953, for example, the Anglophone Caribbean author George Lamming describes a Robeson performance as the very “I’M THE EVERYBODY WHO’S NOBODY” 167 vehicle that enables two characters, the young island boys Trumper and the narrator G., to a deeper apprehension of race as a source of identity alongside other possible utopian and imagined notions of community.3 In the words of Lamming’s Caribbean character Trumper, Robeson reminded the black man that, unlike the “Englishman, an’ the Frenchman, an’ the . . . man of America,” black identity “ain’t have nothin’ to do with where you born.”4 In a recent interview Lamming described Robeson’s continued importance in the Caribbean throughout the 190s as a figure of black male identity that transcended country and nation.5 His popularity in the islands was unchanged even as he was understood in more negative terms as a subversive in the United States. If one traces the various paths taken by this African American performer throughout the 1920s and 1930s, one finds alongside the typical debate between nationalism and internationalism, which shapes the writing of radical histories in the United States during this period, evidence of an alternative form of race radicalism that also questioned the specifically national dimensions of liberatory politics. In the Lamming novel, freedom and the “rights o’ the Negro” are detached from the sense that one’s political identity is grounded in nationality, or nativity. The specifically hemispheric dimensions of black identity bring into focus instead the intimate and contested relationship between discourses of race and nation, as discourses of political freedom, from the very onset and creation of the Atlantic New World. This essay explores the competing political genealogies Robeson represented as an embodiment of the New World slave throughout the 1930s, one whose various performances—whether in song, in the press, onstage, or onscreen—resonated both nationally for white and black American audiences and hemispherically in the surrounding black communities throughout the diaspora. His performance of the “Ballad for Americans” came at the end of a decades-long struggle in which the singer tried to understand the various meanings his blackness evoked in both national and transatlantic spaces. As we explore Robeson’s own efforts to gain control of the meaning of his performances, we discover the contradictory understandings of freedom he generated among the two racial audiences he addressed throughout much of his career: whites across transatlantic and imperial spaces and blacks across diasporic and colonial worlds. Our understanding of the historical influence of this cultural figure for many different “American” communities needs to move beyond the accounts of his later reputation as a socialist. We need to travel backward to the 1920s and 1930s, the formative decades in Robeson’s development of a narrative of race that would later guide his internationalist class politics. In addition, Robeson’s...

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