Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era

3 / Diplomatic and Modern Representations:George Washington Ellis, Henry Francis Downing, and the Myth of Africa

3 / Diplomatic and Modern Representations: George Washington Ellis, Henry Francis Downing, and the Myth of Africa In 1913, the year James Weldon Johnson resigned his Nicaraguan consulship , ex-diplomat George Washington Ellis responded to a friend’s request for a letter treating the topic of “the Negro in the American Foreign Service.” Ellis pointed to Johnson and others to suggest that “the Negro official . . . holds a number of dignified and desirable consulships .” He further recalled the international work performed by “some of the greatest names in the race,” mentioning the “race’s most famous orator and leader,” Frederick Douglass, and noting that John Stephens Durham and John Mercer Langston had “time and again . . . distinguished themselves in the diplomatic history of the United States.” Ellis observed that “the Negro in the diplomatic service” had performed “with credit to the race and entire satisfaction to the American Government.”1 His latter statement—emphasizing “credit to the race” and “satisfaction to the American Government”—is a reminder that for many figures of the New Negro era, entrance into the arena of international representation functioned to shore up the ongoing project of positive race representation. However, with good reason, some in the black community voiced cynicism regarding the prestige and salubrity of the posts to which the United States deployed its black diplomats. Paul Laurence Dunbar recounted that when Richard T. Greener was sent to an “out of the way” post, his friends called it “exile” and sarcastically asked, “Why didn’t the Government make it a sentence instead of veiling it in the guise of an appointment?” (202–03). Similarly, one of James Weldon Johnson’s friends referred to the post in Nicaragua as a “hot and unsanitary hole” (BTWP 10: 495), and Langston Hughes spoke sardonically of the United 70 / lost theaters States’ practice of sending black consuls “to any little old colored country ” (“See-Saw” 32). Clearly, these relatively minor diplomatic appointments were grounded in the project of political representation—but the appointments functioned more as the domestic representation of a US president’s acknowledgment of black support during an election and less as an indication of the United States’ concern with political representation in out-of-the-way locales. Unsurprisingly, then, African American men sometimes “decline[d] posts offered them,” believing that such “assignments were more likely the end than the beginning of a career” (Blakely, “Black” 9). In spite of career risks, health conditions, and comparative lack of representational significance abroad, many black men of the New Negro era accepted minor consulships and other less prestigious appointments. These appointments could (the cynics not withstanding) increase one’s status domestically. After all, as Ellis’s letter demonstrates, employment with the State Department offered the chance to introduce one’s name to a select list of race men that included Douglass and Langston. And assignments specifically to Africa came with the added fascination of living on a continent to which many black diplomats felt ancestral ties. On one hand, the weight of these ties is reflected in Elliot P. Skinner’s important discussions of African American diplomats’ contentions with the State Department for policies that would benefit black populations in Africa.2 A second and as yet uninterrogated reflection of these ties’ importance emerged as several New Negro diplomats who served in Africa later wrote books, articles, and speeches that contemplated the task of representing Africa accurately.3 If contemplating and developing accurate representations of Africa frequently has been a difficult and ethically fraught task, it was uniquely so during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century phase of what has been described as “colonial modernity,” a term acknowledging the global effects of “a capitalism emanating from Euro-America” on “the contemporaneity and the complicity of the modern and the colonial” (Dirlik 18, 20).4 The interrelation of the colonial and the modern—epitomized by transnational circuits of capital, diaspora, aesthetics, and scientific theory—placed Africa (and people of African descent) behind what Ellis termed a “veil of misrepresentation” (“Psychology” 314). The effects of this misrepresentative veil were pervasive. In the United States, Du Bois recognized that white populations fortified the white-supremacist regime via a scientific and historical tradition that “unconsciously distorted” the truth about Africa (Black Folk vii). In London, a black diplomatic and modern representations / 71 and Asian collective observed that Britain’s colonially interested media engaged in “systematic injustice and misrepresentation” of the empire’s...