Race and Ethnicity in "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" and "The Rise of David Levinsky": The Performative Difference

Abstract

Contemporary critics have questioned reliance on black-white binary as defining paradigm of racial formation in United States. Eric Goldstein contends that despite black-white dichotomy's power was never a sufficient framework for understanding much more complex set of categories through which Progressive-Era Americans understood and spoke about (398). Susan Koshy warns us of dangers of leaving the racial untheorized (159). Racialization has indeed been a complex and uneven process in US, and black-white divide is insufficient for explaining how racial categories have operated on level of social practices. However, I argue that very intelligibility of racial groups and ethnicity depends on prior construction of black-white binary. In effect, black-white axis has operated secure tenuousness of a framework of stable boundaries, which in turn has provided necessary grounding for ideology of white supremacy (Wiegman 9). (1) In what follows I examine two seminal novels from Progressive Era: Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). These texts, now canonical within Jewish American and African American literary traditions respectively, were written just a few years apart. novels explicitly query what it means to be American, and they do so by exploring how race affects one's chances of success in Progressive Era US. Werner Sollors sums up similarities between two novels in following way: Both books depict externally upward journeys of protagonists from poverty material success, from ethnic marginality a more 'American' identity, and from a small-town background urban environment of New York (170). While Sollors underscores affinities between two novels, I highlight differences by juxtaposing specific scenes from each text, scenes that have certain narrative and structural similarities. I examine distinctive modalities of and ethnicity as manifested in these Progressive Era texts, arguing that texts reveal three aspects of racial discourse in United States. First, racial discourse has largely evolved around an ideology of a binary opposition: black-white divide. Second, racial discourse has created a very patent racial stratification; while black and white have, for most part, served as reference points and defining terms, there have been intermediary racial groups. Third, constructions of and ethnicity have had very different historical trajectories in US context. The texts, in sum, gesture toward both historical difference between racialized status of African Americans and racial in-betweenness of other minority groups, as well as way in which black-white divide informs construction of these in-between groups. The Train Ride In this section, I extract two scenes from Autobiography and Rise in an attempt illustrate some of ways in which black-white divide has operated. texts, I argue, reveal power of dichotomy, pointing ways it has circumscribed racial logic and categorization. However, they also dramatize uncertainty surrounding racial position of Jew at turn of century, which, I believe, can be seen represent way in which hegemonic discourse on imposed (and produced) ideals of whiteness while simultaneously barring not-quite-white minority groups from privileges of Anglo-Saxon whiteness. The binary opposition can thus be seen serve as a nexus which not only circumscribes racial logic but also spawns what Susan Koshy terms stratified minoritization (155). In latter part of novel, narrator of Autobiography decides pursue a career as a ragtime musician and travels South. …