James Weldon Johnson's Democracy Rag

Abstract

A growing literature in democratic theory interrogates concepts of fugitive democracy in conversation with the history of black fugitive thought and practice. However, most accounts tend to underemphasize the degree to which African American democratic thought has engaged fugitivity as an aesthetic politics amid impasse. I turn to the works of author, composer, and NAACP Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson to discuss the latter, exemplified in his 1912 fictional autobiography. Johnson's representations of improvised Black performance gain a fugitive character by exploiting the limitations of writing to represent sound. In conversation with turn of the century debates over the racial politics of ragtime's syncopated rhythms, I read in Johnson a "ragged writing" structured by performances that, while remaining essential to the narrator's avowed democratic aims, nevertheless escape their fixity in writing.