The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster

Abstract

The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster Allyson Nadia Field (bio) Imagine what new histories could emerge from a commitment to doing more with less. —Ashley D. Farmer (2018)1 By accident I reached Chicago. … What was I to do in this big Windy City? —William Foster writing as Juli Jones, Jr. (1910)2 William Foster is a frustrating figure for the film historian. One of the first African American film producers—quite possibly the first—Foster made short comedies and actualities in Chicago in the 1910s, including his celebrated one-reel farce The Railroad Porter (US, 1913). He was also a prolific author for newspapers and other publications, writing extensively about Black vaudeville and musical theater, the film industry, and opportunities for Black entrepreneurship, and serving as a highly respected authority on African American sports and entertainment in the early twentieth century. Yet Foster has eluded sustained engagement from historians and film scholars. A central reason for this is that, despite the volume of his writing, he elides details of his life, career, and creative output. And, as with many early African American filmmakers, none of Foster's films are known to survive.3 In my work, I've sought to find methodologies for writing with, rather than despite, such absences, turning them into generative sites from which to create film histories that aren't deterred by archival lacunae but find in them different forms of presence.4 If, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's [End Page 82] terms, the archive's "silences" are functions of power, there's an imperative to accounting for what we cannot see, motivated as well by "the political and ethical demands of the present," requiring us to reorient ourselves towards the gaps and elisions of the archive.5 Yet, while Foster didn't leave extensive records of his filmmaking or details of his life and career that we know of, he did publish multiple autobiographical anecdotes and narratives. Many of these seem to be forms of satire, either of himself or of others. Foster also wrote two "memoirs": a 1910 "Life History" of his alter ego, the journalist Juli Jones, Jr., published in the Indianapolis Freeman, and a 1928 article consisting of his recollections of Black theater performers (but no discussion of his own life or work) that appeared in the inaugural (and only) issue of The Official Theatrical World of Colored Artists.6 Film historians, including me, have drawn from his journalism in discussions of his theatrical and filmmaking work, and the 1928 "memoirs" are regularly cited by scholars of Black musical theater, despite its omissions.7 However, the "Life History," a fictional memoir, has not been acknowledged or engaged with, likely because it is so clearly satiric fabulation with no evident correspondence with the actual events of Foster's life. It eschews the gravitas of the memoir form in favor of irreverent, even sarcastic, fantasy. How should we read it? What place does such a text have in works of history? Foster wrote "The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior" when he was about fifty years old and three years before he turned to filmmaking. I discuss it here not to dispel its self-mythologizing, or to provide a "true history" that refutes its stances, but to take the account seriously as an extant self-presentation of a figure whose absence looms over Black film historiography. The "Life History," as with Foster's persona and career, lends itself to speculative interpretation. The ephemeral traces of Foster's life and work are, in the aggregate, an indeterminate archive of an elusive figure. In embracing indeterminacy, José Esteban Muñoz finds value in "ephemeral evidence" rather than the "traditionally evidentiary."8 As he writes, speaking of queer lives in particular, "Ephemera includes traces of lived experience and performances of lived experience, maintaining experiential politics and urgencies long after these structures of feeling have been lived."9 In the case of Foster's fictive self-fashioning, his own performance of lived experience, publicly presented and widely circulated, constitutes autofiction—even autotheory—a fictocritical self-portrayal that itself is speculative and invites speculative engagement.10 This approach recognizes that Foster's self-satire...