The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Norton Critical Edition ed. by Jacqueline Goldsby (review)

Abstract

GOLDSBY, JACQUELINE, ed. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Norton Critical Edition. By James Weldon Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. 439 pp. $13.12 paperback. James Weldon Johnson is remembered for penning the lyrics of the black civil rights anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing and for serving as the first African American executive secretary of the NAACP (1920-1930). Just as Johnson's activism prefigured the tactics of later waves of civil-rights protest--he led silent march against lynching in New York City during the summer of 1917--his literary innovations placed him at the avant-garde of both the New Negro arts movement and Anglo-American modernism. In her 2015 Norton Critical Edition of Johnson's novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (ECM), Jacqueline Goldsby foregrounds Johnson's modernism and avant-garde stats, building on approaches taken by Henry Louis Gates, in his introduction to the 1989 Vintage edition, and William L. Andrews, in his preface to the 1990 Penguin edition. Goldsby's is the first annotated, scholarly edition that allows readers to explore how Johnson's ECM--as well as its publication and reception history--challenges our notions of what makes work modern and what counts as novel. Goldsby provides excerpts from drafts of ECM, historical sources, correspondence relating to the novel's publication and composition, and reviews contemporary with its 1912, 1927, and 1948 printings, along with copious explanatory footnotes. This material illuminates Johnson's engagement with the African American novel, American literary modernism, and 1940s mass culture, making this edition valuable resource for scholars and graduate students looking for way into Johnson's eclectic and enigmatic career. Goldsby's edition of addresses the racial politics of American literary production, especially the demand for African American writers to emphasize objectivity and personal experience over creativity and imagination. She observes that ECM was not received as and asks, Why was that misreading possible? (xlvii). Citing Carl Van Vechten's description of as a composite autobiography of the Negro race (121), Goldsby observes that even those readers who knew was fiction, not autobiography, praised its dispassionate, objective portrayal of social facts rather than its style, characterization, and narrative innovations. Goldsby offers reason for this misreading: to acknowledge the creativity of black writers in the early twentieth century granted fiction writers intellectual authority that American society otherwise denied black people (xxiv), and categorizing literature produced by black authors as documentary rather than inventive was way of containing this authority. In her introduction, Goldsby reverses that treatment, highlighting how Johnson's manipulation of time, setting, point of view, and stream of consciousness places in conversation with works by Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen. Emphasizing Johnson's heretical distortions of the autobiographical tradition from Douglass to DuBois and his rejection of melodrama and allegory, Goldsby sketches out Johnson's role in constructing modernism's future (lvi) by creating novel whose formal departures reflect its political stakes. In addition to illuminating Johnson's formal breakthroughs, Goldsby's edition of highlights the novel's connections with non-literary media and its status as commodity. …