This essay focuses on James Weldon Johnson's overlapping literary and diplomatic careers. Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, written while he worked as a US consul in Latin America, draws upon tropes of international representation to weigh in upon questions of aesthetic and racial representation. Tracing Johnson's transition from a US representative abroad to a race representative within the US, the essay argues that Johnson's case illustrates the importance of permitting the significant tradition of black work in the US's diplomatic program to inform the ways we approach African America's expressive and geopolitical engagements with the international world.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
323 p., A comprehensive study of the decisive 5-year period between 1962 and 1967 which witnessed the unfolding of an intense decolonization dialogue between Britain and its far-flung Eastern Caribbean possessions at the height of the Cold War.
