Master-Slave Dialectics in Charles Johnson's "The Education of Mingo"

Abstract

slave is a part of master, a living but separated part of his bodily frame. (Aristotle, Politics 1255b-10) In a postscript to The Phenomenology of Black Body (1993), Charles Johnson describes difficult circumstances under which he originally composed that essay in 1975. A graduate student in philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, Johnson was in midst of one of most difficult years in his life--a year marked by unemployment and hardship, as well as by birth of his son Malik (611). (1) During this year of increased family responsibilities and decreased financial resources, Johnson nevertheless found time to write first complete draft of Oxherding Tale, a novel that he would see published seven years--and several revisions--later. More surprising, perhaps, is that Johnson somehow made time during this difficult year to read Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Heidegger's Being and Time, and MerleauPonty's Phenomenology of Perception--all in little over a month. Thus, if 1975 was a year in which Johnson was to draft what some believe to be his finest novel, it was also a time in which he solidifie d an interest in philosophical descriptions of intentionality and subject-object -- what Johnson describes as the correlate of and its content, noesis-noema, or subject and (600). (2) Johnson draws upon several philosophical accounts of subjectivity in The Phenomenology of Black Body, citing -- among others -- Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Fanon, MerleauPonty, Sartre, and Du Bois. He concludes that experience of black embodiment should be understood as a distinctive variation on subject-object -- one that develops within and out of a color-caste system. As Johnson explains, The experience of Black becomes, not merely a Self-Other conflict, nor simply Hegel's torturous master-slave dialectic, but a variation on both these conditions, intensified by particularity of body's appearance as black ... [and] as lacking interiority (605). Within a color-caste system, Johnson suggests, subjectivity of Blacks is denied, as they are one-sidedly seen by whites and appear as body sans mind for (608). ambiguity of lived -- as both subject and object -- is thus reduced by white Other to status of a thing. Influenced by var ious twentieth-century responses to Hegel's phenomenological analysis of encounter with Other, Johnson's reading of phenomenology of black as a special variation on subject-object anticipates more recent inquiries into what bell hooks calls looking relations (125) and Gayatri Spivak identifies as the mechanics of constitution of (294). Johnson's understanding of phenomenology of Black also provides an important context for understanding his early short story The Education of Mingo. Originally published in Mother Jones shortly after first appearance of The Phenomenology of Black Body, tale's direct allusion to structures of intentional consciousness (6) serves as a textual invitation to read this philosophical fable in context of that earlier essay. (3) Indeed, The Education of Mingo can be read as Johnson's fictional engagement with -- and self-conscious re-writing of -- various philosophical analyses of subject-object r elations, including Hegel's well-known master-slave dialectic. Masters and Slaves ... just where master has effectively achieved lordship, he really finds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not an independent, but rather a dependent that he has achieved. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind 236-37) central character in The Education of Mingo is Moses Green, a poor white Southerner living in antebellum America. Although he inhabits a country shaped by historical diversity -- a fact made clear when he pays for his purchases with Mexican coin and eats hominy made from Indian corn - Moses nevertheless feels threatened by what he perceives as an increasing American pluralism (3). …