Charles Johnson in Context

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charles Johnson in Context Marc C. Conner (bio) Selzer, Linda Furgerson . Charles Johnson in Context. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2009. The scholarly work produced on the novelist, short-story writer, philosopher, and cultural theorist Charles Johnson has become increasingly sophisticated and penetrating in the past decade. The first book-length study of Johnson's work, Jonathan Little's Charles Johnson's Spiritual Imagination (1997), set forth several fundamental readings of and approaches to Johnson; then Will Nash's astute Charles Johnson's Fiction (2003) studied Johnson's political and literary influences in keen detail; Gary Storhoff's Understanding Charles Johnson (2004) delved deeply into the Buddhist elements in Johnson's work; Rudolph Byrd's Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest (2005) explored Johnson's work as offering heteroglossic readings of American culture; and finally Marc Conner and Will Nash's edited volume, Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher(2007), brought together a number of scholars in assessing Johnson's work from the multiple perspectives of philosophy, Johnson's original discipline. Over this ten-year span, the general terrain of Johnson scholarship has been marked, and the main issues and concepts have been pursued to some degree of completion. The time has come for studies of Johnson that build upon these fine works and pursue Johnson's writings further, examining Johnson in combination with other late-twentieth-century American writers, or in conversation with his historical time and place, or focusing on his development of particular ideas and concepts. Linda Selzer has accomplished precisely this in her superb study, Charles Johnson in Context. Moving from the work that has come before her (and to which she herself contributed), Selzer explores Johnson's writing from within three major intellectual contexts, producing an interpretation of Johnson's work and importance that is impressive in its depth and intellectual power. Selzer engages Johnson through three major lenses of interpretation, focusing on the contexts of black philosophers, black Buddhists, and the "new" black intellectuals. By bringing these crucial contexts into relief, Selzer is able to tie Johnson's artistic achievements to the larger projects of those working to reform the practice of American academic philosophy in the [End Page 569] post-World War II era, those seeking to translate an ancient religious practice into an African American idiom, and those attempting to redefine cosmopolitan thought in order to make it a more effective tool for social justice. Johnson's participation in all three of these endeavors deepens the historical import, social consequence, and conceptual depth of his art. (2) Selzer's ambitious intellectual approach accomplishes a double aim, both increasing our understanding of the influence on Johnson of these contexts, and at the same time showing how "Johnson's characteristic fusion of literature, Buddhism, and philosophy . . . vigorously participates in, advances, and helps to define larger directions in American intellectual life" (2). The result is a series of strong readings of Johnson's fiction, which further illuminate Johnson's own time and intellectual history. Selzer examines Johnson's own biography as a young black philosophy student in the late 1960s and as part of a larger movement in which black intellectuals moved increasingly into both the public sphere and the academic profession as philosophers. Such figures as Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stephen Carter, Johnson, and several others have revised American cosmopolitan thought. Selzer reads Johnson's National Book Award-winning novel, Middle Passage (1990), against the background of a rise of black intellectuals who opposed the increasing specialization and narrowness of traditional academia in favor of "organic" intellectual work and the effort "to articulate a cosmopolitanism that maintains an interplay between universals and particulars" (162, 167). Such efforts harmonize with much of Johnson's thought and work: "Johnson frequently enunciates a position that resonates with attempts to articulate a cosmopolitanism that reclaims the normative force of the universal while recognizing multiple, overlapping allegiances" (169). Selzer acknowledges how Middle Passage's setting—a raucous slave-ship crossing the Atlantic in the 1830s—hardly seems propitious to cosmopolitan thought; yet she illustrates the ways in which Johnson infuses this setting with complex intellectual figures of diverse backgrounds who articulate a range...