Cosmopolitanism in Georgia Douglas Johnson's Anti-Lynching Literature

Abstract

In December 1874, African Methodist Episcopal Church changed design on front page of its major publication, Christian Recorder. new banner featured an image of continent of Africa, apparently emphasizing American church members' sense of connection to Africa. While caption Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God (1) possibly reflected church's missionary ideals rather than a sense of Pan-African identity, it initiates a series of literary and journalistic moves that ushered continent of Africa into national imagination without invoking its status as dark continent. (2) In an era when dominant cultural references to Africa would ingrain (in minds of white Americans), fixed notions of savagery, heathens, and evil, several African American writers sought to disrupt discourse of primitivism, civilization, and racial supremacy by embracing an imagined African past in various ways. (3) significance of symbol at center of Christian Recorder banner more reflects black Americans' status as participants in building of a modern republic than their accurate ideas about geographical space that was Africa itself. In a letter to Recorder's editor dated March 22, 1877, B. A. Imes argued that the notion that a people just out of bondage, with all results of its degradation clinging to them, should better their condition by migrating to its shore is preposterous. Like most middle-class African Americans, Imes demanded that America be transformed to accommodate blacks: The genius of its own institutions our birthright and unrequited toil, entitle us to a home. Nineteenth-century black intellectuals argued that Africa had much to offer US, and perhaps too much to offer its African American citizens. In work of prolific author and activist Frances Harper, for example, references to African ancestry most frequently fall under category of a phrase that does not overtly reject discourses of African cultural inferiority. Harper, like her activist sister of next generation Ida B. Wells, subtly clarifies and inverts meaning of to illustrate that after white Americans cursed Africans with slavery, they cursed them further with racial terrorism in form of lynching. Pauline Hopkins, novelist and editor of Colored American Magazine, argues for cultural syncretism and recognition of African contributions to modern culture and civilization; neither she nor Harper advocated black nationalism in its back-to-Africa incarnation. Their white-looking black heroines, usually octoroons with one-eighth black and seven-eighths white blood, symbolize an African cultural presence in American body politic. Saidiya Hartman has observed that development of a racist social structure in early 1900s revolves largely around demarcation of black body as alien and dangerous to patriarchal order that would govern an increasingly imperialist and masculinist United States national identity. Hartman suggests that the placement and proximity of blacks among, amidst, and within greater body of Americans and in perception of a discernible 'us' encroached upon by black intruders identified 'Negro problem' with question of social, thereby involving matters of intimacy, association, and (165). intimacy and need implied in interracial relationship that spawned so-called octoroon children also signified an interdependence between US and African cultures. Practitioners of progressive philosophy, such as Jane Addams, envisioned a cosmopolitan civilization. Eric Kaufman enumerates four goals of progressive cosmopolitanism: (1) to oppose Anglo-conformist modes of assimilation, (2) to celebrate cultural diversity of United States, (3) to endorse inter-ethnic contact and hybridity, and simultaneously (4) to eschew maintenance of diverse ethnic communities (1089). …