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83 participation demonstrated their commitment to local culture and politics as well as their value of “talk” in such forums as the Civic Club, the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild. In spaces such as the male-oriented Venezuelan pool hall and the feminist club of New York’s “white” Bohemia—Greenwich Village—the Johnsons engaged in “passing” through the potentially unstable concepts of race and gender, using interpolation as a means of achieving the physical alteration of their surroundings.1 Same-sex talk enabled conversation about the discursive formation of modern identity through concepts of racialized and gendered bodies while at the same time encouraging resistance to them by testing their boundaries. Interpolation—the act of inserting foreign matter or new material into existing material so as to alter, enlarge, or adulterate it—is often applied to text and music, but it is also an important agent of performance . This chapter discusses the performative interpolations at work in Johnson’s modern milieu—evidenced by his actions and those of two of his male friends—that the author uses in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as well as in his orchestration of the Silent Protest Parade. This modern environment was a ground for experimentation in articulations of black masculinity, including the expression of a sexuality that was neither the hypersexualized, greedy, miscegenating, and rapacious portrait of Jack Johnson that was created by a white majority 3 the Interpolated Body passing, same-sex talk, and discursive formations in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Though there are clearly good historical reasons for keeping “race” and “sexuality” and “sexual difference” as separate analytic spheres, there are also quite pressing and significant historical reasons for asking how and where we might read not only their convergence, but the sites at which one cannot be constituted save through the other. —Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter Grace Nail and James Weldon Johnson’s active civic 84 c h a P t e r t h r e e nor the repressed, asexual, physically inexpressive portrait enforced by the black church. Both hyperbolic attitudes can be seen as opposing responses to the pressing concern of social change—the “uplift” of a recently emancipated black population—in the modern century. That this fear or repression was located in black male bodies demonstrates the intense focus placed upon men like James Weldon Johnson as perceived agents or symbols of this change. Recognizing this close physical scrutiny, Johnson chose to direct his works through interpolation, continually transforming and modifying his works by incorporating sound, effectively voicing his works through the bodies of others. Johnson’s representation of the interpolated body and interpolated compositions through sound emphasizes its physical significance, as sound enters into its listener. As we saw in chapter 1, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man demonstrates that auditory exposure necessitates the alteration of its listener. There is a gendered as well as a racial significance to this experience of sound. In this 1912 work, Johnson’s interpolated body—the text itself—performs racial and gendered passing.2 As Philip Brian Harper has effectively shown, “Conceptual limits . . . govern the novel of racial ‘passing’ such that it seems inevitably to support a conservative gender politics wherein black masculinity itself is conceived of as fundamentally problematic .”3 For Harper, the “feminized orientation” of the Ex-Colored Man indicates the extent to which the “literary mulatto” has been figured through “mixed race identity” almost exclusively in relation to femininity , indicating the “perennially problematic” category of black masculinity .4 The Ex-Colored Man’s racial ambiguity is articulated through “a gender identity that is anything but properly masculine, and verging dangerously on a sexual identity that is anything but hetero.”5 The narrator ’s relationship with his “millionaire friend” underscores the masculine anxiety made apparent by the narrator’s racial ambiguity: their domestic relationship is interrupted by the Ex-Colored Man’s choice to accept his black identity by leaving his patron/partner. The novel’s performance of this relationship, which the narrator describes as his most intimate besides that which he shared with his mother, indicates the difficulty of assuming a “normative masculinity” through these set categories of African American identity.6 It’s arguable that there was no discursive representation of “normative masculinity” for black men in the first decade of the twentieth century, although the male-centered New Negro era at its height in the mid-1920s would...

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