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

Part III. Hip-to-macy

part iii Hip-to-macy New Negro Internationalism and American Studies Continuing to travel and write long after the New Negro era, Langston Hughes emerged during the 1960s as one of the commentators who has most provocatively theorized the integration of diplomatic and African American cultures. In his 1965 collection Simple’s Uncle Sam, Hughes presents readers with a scene in which Harlem folk character Jesse B. Semple discusses how best to “take up the international situation.” “I would call a Summit Meeting,” Simple explains, “and get together with all the big heads of state of the world.” Simple’s interlocutor replies, “I gather you would . . . become a diplomat.” But Simple retorts, “A hip-to-mat, . . . minding everybody’s business but my own, . . . looking like an Englishman. But what would be different about me is I would be black. . . . [I would say,] ‘Gentlemens of the Summit, I want you-all to think of how you can provide everybody in the world with bread and meat. Civil rights comes next. Let everybody have civil rights, white, black, yellow, brown, gray, grizzle, or green. . . . So many leaders is in the game for payola. . . . But me, self-appointed, I am beholden to nobody” (162–63). Continuing his hypothetical Summit address, the hipto -mat asks, “Do I hear some of you-all say, ‘It do not matter what Harlem thinks’?” He gives his reply: “I regret to inform you, gentlemens of the Summit, that it do!” (164). 118 / hip-to-macy Clearly, Simple’s vision for international engagement involves none of the knee-pants, poodlism, or curtsying that Wright deplored in the role of New Negro artistic ambassador. Instead of worrying about protocol or state-generated performance imperatives, Simple is brassily selfappointed and apparently beholden to no one. To describe his status, he coins the term hip-to-mat, a neologism splicing the phrase hip to that into the term diplomat and thereby integrating the hip knowingness of black vernacular culture into official diplomacy’s traditionally staid approach to internationalism. “Looking [not quite] like” white diplomats , Simple’s model hip-to-mats would be diplomats but ersatz—with their ersatz status introducing a subversive parody to the international stage as the practitioners of hip-to-macy go over world leaders’ heads and under their noses. Hughes, as a black intellectual whose travels often brought him into close quarters with official internationalism,1 was in an excellent position to imagine a conceptual category through which to theorize the long-established African American practice of signifying on international diplomacy by making use of its tropes and methods in unofficial ways. In fact, to the degree that New Negro consuls and diplomats permitted official diplomacy to inform their unofficial work in racial and literary representation, each of them may be thought of as a hip-to-mat avant la lettre. This study’s final part, however, is less concerned with black US citizens whose work in diplomacy became an enduring component of their public identities. Rather, part 3 draws attention to figures including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, and Richard Wright, whose modes of hip-to-matic internationalism developed in dialogue with a sustained and often strained contact with official internationalism. Du Bois, Hunt, and Wright function as bridges between the New Negro era’s corps of official diplomats and the larger group of writers and intellectuals who have contributed to the African American (and indeed black diasporan) internationalist tradition. This larger tradition of black internationalism is constituted by the many self-appointed commentators whose work has critiqued, intersected with, and taken inspiration from a twentieth-century internationalism invested in traditional diplomatic encounters as well as new formations and institutions such as the League of Nations, a burgeoning proletarian internationalism, the United Nations, and the Non-Aligned Movement . Riffing on these modes of internationalism, uncounted African American writers and commentators have, like Simple, taken up the international situation. hip-to-macy / 119 In complement to its interpretive consequences for New Negro diplomacy and the larger black internationalist tradition, Hughes’s theorization of hip-to-macy has significant heuristic value in relation to the field of American studies. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the discipline of American studies increasingly has assumed an attitude of critique in reference to the American exceptionalism that frequently characterized Americanist scholarship during the Cold War.2 Many new Americanist scholars, attempting to distance themselves methodologically from...