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This chapter daws on three published sociological works: Franklin E. Frazier’s, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), Charles S. Johnson’s, Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), and Charles H. Parrish’s, Color Names and Color Notions (1946). These sociological views on color showed brown identity as an emergent social ideal and image of African America, and in varying degrees drew crucial connections of brownness to values associated with an ascendant middle-class status. These sociologists are presented as racial liberals who offered concrete and critical assessments of the rising idealization of brown complexions among African American youth coming of age between the Great Depression and World War II.

This chapter analyzes Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008) as attempts to craft the “new and better stories” of the African American experience that Charles Johnson’s 2008 essay “The End of the Black American Narrative” calls for. Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” posits Obama’s election as a turning point in African American literature, reflecting a new era of representation for African American authors. Through an analysis of Johnson’s essay in concert with Whitehead’s and Beatty’s novels, this chapter argues that these works illuminate a brief moment of optimism for the transcendence not of race itself but of the structural role that race has played and continues to play in American governance. With their shared representation of racial identity as a form of branding, Whitehead and Beatty point towards new conceptualizations of Blackness that embrace contingency and fluidity.

Chapter Four looks closely at arguments about the significance of prejudice to the race problem in a center of African American intellectual life that aimed explicitly to use social science to inform political strategizing: Fisk University’s Race Relations Institutes (RRI). The yearly, three-week summer conferences that sociologist Charles S. Johnson initiated in 1944 at one of the nation’s leading historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) show that racial individualism faced substantial challenges in some postwar intellectual arenas. At the same time, the RRI’s history exposes dilemmas associated with politically engaged social science. While political economic and social structural theories of the race issue endured in the late 1940s at the RRI, Institute participants increasingly embraced both psychological and rights based individualism in their political agendas, regardless of the theories they espoused.

This chapter demonstrates that Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity or consciousness by offering a philosophically and spiritually informed thematic narrative of the formation of a black diasporic subject. By the novel’s end, the protagonist arrives at an analytically and emotionally processed awareness of his identity position as a member of the African diaspora, recognizes that both rupture and connection characterize his relationship with Africanity, and acknowledges the necessity of an ever-continuing existential journey. This chapter also reveals that transformed/liberated perception and transformed/liberated consciousness are inextricably intertwined in Middle Passage. Owing to this connection, Johnson bolsters his narrative of the formation of diasporic subjectivity (a narrative of the formation of one type of transformed/liberated consciousness) by conversing with the role of perception in Melville’s Benito Cereno, in phenomenology, and in Buddhism. Finally, this chapter emphasizes that Johnson’s phenomenologically and Buddhistically informed emphasis on the malleability of black diasporic identity offers a counterargument to black cultural nationalistic positions, which he sees as propagating fixed, static notions of blackness.

In Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, Bluebeard was never a pirate. Yet he is always linked to piracy, particularly to Blackbeard, Captain Edward Teach of Bristol. Captain Charles Johnson published an account of Blackbeard, A General History of the Pirates, in 1724. Another possible cause for the confusion between Bluebeard and Blackbeard is the fact that Teach had multiple marriages: he married his fourteenth bride, believed to be Mary Ormond, a sixteen-year-old planter’s daughter. Robert Lee also wrote a biography of Blackbeard, claiming that he was a victim of the women he could not resist. In addition to his wives, Blackbeard and other pirates are believed to have hidden treasure, making their stories conducive to intertextual connection with Bluebeard, who did not want his wife to examine his affairs too closely. This chapter examines Bluebeard’s connection to pirates and looks at a number of serial killers who were labeled in the contemporary media as “Bluebeard” or “lady Bluebeard.”

Chapter 3 opens the examination of the trope of temporal disjuncture, which will continue in chapter four. It argues that Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale manipulate past and present modalities (respectively), to contradict the Enlightenment principle that history moves forward progressively and linearly. However, where most scholarship on these novels links temporal disjuncture to non-Western conceptions of time, this chapter suggests that their alternative temporalities reveal a strange and often disconcerting faithfulness to the theology of time that Augustine of Hippo laid out in some of his most canonical works. Since Augustinian theology has had such formative, lasting consequences for Western Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, the argument uncovers a tension in these novels, both of which very plainly reject Western conceptions of chronological progress. Yet such theological contradictions constitute the revisionary historiographic aims of the genre and establish its importance to our understanding of African American literarature.

Chapter 3 explores the fieldwork of Charles S. Johnson within the Julius Rosenwald Fund and United States Public Health Service’s syphilis treatment program for tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, during the early years of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. A Black sociologist and chair of the Social Science Department at Fisk University, Johnson used the folk category to challenge the idea that America did not have a peasant class and a feudal order in the Jim Crow South. He and members affiliated with Fisk University documented the conjure practices and “social taboos” among tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Johnson concluded that these spiritual practices and social customs were indicators that these poor workers occupied a lower stage of mental and moral development. Rejecting racial traits, Johnson and his research team focused on the racial prejudice and cotton system that stunted not only their religion, but equally, their health maturation. Moreover, he concluded that their folk religion was outside modern health and familial structure. Johnson joined the Rosenwald Fund in an effort to reform their folk religion by organizing the treatment program to extend modern healthcare to them. But Johnson recycled the racial logics that he sought to get away from by accenting their immoral sexual habits, “bad” family structure, and outmoded beliefs. This chapter argues that he considered the religion of Black rural “folk” to have developed in isolated from modern medicine as well as proper forms of family and sex. He concluded that it hindered their mental, moral, and medicinal progress.

The fifth chapter argues that feeling “black post-black” is a disorienting situation that lends itself to satire. Crawford analyzes the ways in which satire has begun to define 21^st century African American cultural productions as both blackness and whiteness are satirized. The satire of the Black Arts Movement is shown to be much more invested in satirizing whiteness as opposed to the 21^st century post-black tendency to foreground the satirizing of blackness. In addition to the analysis of novels, drama, and poetry, this chapter also uncovers the role of satire in editorial cartoons included in Black World, one of the key journals of the Black Arts Movement. This chapter foregrounds the satire of Charles Johnson, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and others.

This chapter focuses on The Messenger and Opportunity, two of the most important black-edited periodicals associated with the Harlem Renaissance. The Messenger was significant in part because of its early ties to radical socialism; the editorial contributions of George S. Schuyler (the chief satirist of the Harlem Renaissance in a golden age of satire); and the theatre criticism of Theophilus Lewis, the most significant black drama critic of the movement. Opportunity magazine, founded in 1923 as an organ of the National Urban League, sought to build a New Negro aesthetic on the foundations of folk expression and in relation to African antecedents. Its editor, sociologist Charles S. Johnson, was one of the chief nurturers of the Negro Renaissance. He gave literature pride of place in Opportunity, cultivated new black writers, and organized events that would showcase them.

This chapter examines the local historical context of the Black Chicago Renaissance. It discusses the existence of a layered class structure within the black community, and underscores the importance and the complicated tradition of support of the arts by elite black and later members of the black entrepreneurial and professional middle class. Black patronage, for both aesthetic and exploitative reasons, served an important function in providing space for creative expression and the means for its distribution and commoditization. Furthermore, the chapter is a response to the claims made by social scientists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. In 1923, Johnson declared that Chicago's intellectual life had numerous excuses for not existing. In 1929, Fraser echoed Johnson's assertion, insisting that Chicago had no intelligentsia.

This chapter examines how Weatherford’s views on race continued to evolve from the mid-1930s until his death in 1970. In this period he worked for ten years as a professor at Fisk University and stayed involved in racial concerns. He also authored two books on race relations: one coedited with the noted African American sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and another that called for churches to be at the forefront of desegregation. Nevertheless, Weatherford in many ways left the subject of race after 1946, as the pace of change on racial issues moved more quickly than he was comfortable with. His withdrawal from racial efforts was typical of other liberals who had been involved in the issue before the 1950s, who, like him, never became activists in the era’s nonviolent civil disobedience efforts. One important point of this chapter, however, is to note that Weatherford began to shift his views on Jim Crow, finally calling for its end by 1943. This section shows the change over time of his views and how larger events (World War II and the Great Depression) and his own personal experiences (his intimate interactions with black students and professors at Fisk while on the faculty there) moved him along.

This introductory chapter first describes the artists featured in this volume. These twelve musicians, singers, and groups recorded between 1934 and 1942—seven black and five white—provide a baker's dozen of folksongs and traditional tunes. Apart from their surpassing artistic gifts, these individuals illuminate an America rich with local creativity. They resided in such places as Salyersville, Kentucky; Byhalia, Mississippi; and Salem, Virginia. They also confined their music making largely to their own communities. Sometimes they sang on playgrounds, sometimes while chopping cotton, and sometimes from behind bars. The remainder of the chapter discusses sociologist and a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Charles S. Johnson; the origins of the present volume; and the author's recollections of the wonderful, frustrating, frightening, and transporting moments with the songs and singers that comprised the present volume.

Chapter 3 chronicles the interwar case of the Firestone Company in Liberia against the backdrop of the League of Nations’ Slavery and Forced Labour Conventions of 1926 and 1934. While Liberia differs from later postcolonial states in its unique history and early independent status, the case of Firestone in Liberia is a precursor to future relations between foreign companies and postcolonial states. Given the power balance between the company and Liberia, the government was incapable of introducing limitations on the private enterprise’s labour policies. Liberia’s engagement with the Firestone Company thus provides an intriguing prelude to the incapacity of the emerging international legal order to abolish the enslavement of humans, and further demonstrates how this very limitation was able to facilitate the enslavement of political communities.

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement marked by increased literary, musical, and artistic creativity by African American artists who wanted to challenge the prevailing stereotypical representation of their image. Writers and artists came from all over the United States to participate. In Los Angeles, writer Wallace Thurman encouraged fellow post-office worker Arna Bontemps to go to Harlem. Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to move to New York City. All of these great thinkers, writers, and artists would pass through the 135th Street Branch, where Regina was assigned.

This chapter chronicles Reddick’s early life from his adolescence in Jacksonville, Florida to his collegiate career in Nashville, Tennessee. It explains how Fisk University, where he earned a BA in 1932 and an MA in 1933 while studying under Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Dow Turner, Horace Mann Bond, and Arturo Schomburg, provided Reddick with the social network and intellectual training that guided his early entry into professional academic life. At Fisk, he became active in Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; published in the Journal of Negro Education, The Crisis, and Opportunity; criticized the Southern Agrarians, and studied the racism in history textbooks. This chapter also explains how the Great Depression loomed large in Reddick’s formative years and pushed his politics to the left.

Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pirates had the difficult task of balancing the revolutionary ideology of piracy with the fact of its recent demise and the undeniable triumph of colonial power. This difficulty is distilled in the story of Captain Misson, which shows the idealization of pirate life fall apart in its physical execution. The pirates on Misson’s ship, who establish a colony (Libertalia) rooted in the egalitarianism of pirate ships, eventually devolve into precisely the imperial practices against which their colony was founded. The story of Misson demonstrates the dangers of the imposition of an imagined space on a physical space and seems to insist on the impossibility of such practices. This chapter argues, however, that Misson’s colony, in its delineation of the forces that threaten such utopian settlements, simultaneously imagines an alternative society that manages such forces.

Chapter 4 discusses the common HOME AS PRISON/PRISON AS HOME tropes. It first illustrates the paradox of the happy prison in a discussion of Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Turning to the negative trope of the home as prison, it traces its ramifications in Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The uncanny ambivalence of metaphoric imprisonment is then illustrated in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Focusing on domesticity, the chapter next turns to the HOME AS PRISON topos and its manifestation in the MARRIAGE AS PRISON metaphor. Case studies include texts about both male and female marital incarceration: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’ and Fay Weldon’s ‘Weekend’.