Artistic Ambassadors

Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era

Brian Russell Roberts

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780813933672
• eBook ISBN: 9780813933696
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

During the first generation of black participation in U.S. diplomacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vibrant community of African American writers and cultural figures worked as U.S. representatives abroad. Through the literary and diplomatic dossiers of figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Archibald and Angelina Grimké, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, and Richard Wright, Brian Roberts shows how the intersection of black aesthetic trends and U.S. political culture both Americanized and internationalized the trope of the New Negro. This decades-long relationship began during the days of Reconstruction, and it flourished as U.S. presidents courted and rewarded their black voting constituencies by appointing black men as consuls and ministers to such locales as Liberia, Haiti, Madagascar, and Venezuela. These appointments changed the complexion of U.S. interactions with nations and colonies of color; in turn, state-sponsored black travel gave rise to literary works that imported international representation into New Negro discourse on aesthetics, race, and African American culture.

Beyond offering a narrative of the formative dialogue between black transnationalism and U.S. international diplomacy, Artistic Ambassadors also illuminates a broader literary culture that reached both black and white America as well as the black diaspora and the wider world of people of color. In light of the U.S. appointments of its first two black secretaries of state and the election of its first black president, this complex representational legacy has continued relevance to our understanding of current American internationalism.

Part I: Representative Characters: The New Negro’s Representative Elements and Official Internationalism

Arriving on the heels of the nineteenth-century heyday of blackface minstrelsy, the years of the 1890s through the 1930s witnessed a struggle on the part of many African Americans to wrest the role of black race representation from white America. This was a struggle against what came to be known as the Old Negro, a myth and formula that circulated as the condensation of minstrelesque figures ranging from Jim Crow to Zip Coon, from Rastus to Sambo, and from Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima. Calling on black writers and artists to combat the degrading legacies of the Old Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois proposed the following thought experiment: “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans? Now turn it around. Suppose you were to write a story and put in the kind of people you know and like and imagine” (“Criteria” 296). For many black American writers of this era, the kind of people to know and like and imagine circulated under the banner of the New Negro, a discursive formation seeking to supplant “the Negro painted by white Americans.” The trope of the New Negro offered an image conflating blackness with urban sophistication, educational attainment, middle-class poise, and economic success. For many members of the black intelligentsia,

using writing and art to evoke these qualities—and indeed performing these qualities bodily—was supposed to argue for a black humanity meriting the full rights of US citizenship.

If middle-class poise was less than typical among the masses of black US citizens who were only one generation removed from slavery, then the comparatively elite cultural arbiters of the New Negro era sought ways to privilege their own middle-class attributes and performances in the construction of the race’s public face. As Alain Locke wrote the introduction for his influential anthology The New Negro (1925), he reached for terminology that could, in apparently salutary ways, confuse the category of the demographically typical with the category of the demographically exceptional, which Du Bois famously referred to as the race’s talented tenth.¹ Capitalizing on the slippage between representative as typical and representative as elect, Locke referred to New Negro society as made up of “the more intelligent and representative elements” of the race (9). This play on the term representative was a shrewd instance of demographic legerdemain, as on a discursive level it operated to move the talented tenth from the race’s margins to the race’s center, supplanting the masses’ representative character (based on perceived status as typical) with a representative character evoked by exceptional presentability.²

Locke, of course, was not alone in working to construct the race’s elite as representative, and several scholars have offered genealogies that trace the production of the New Negro’s representational relationship to the black masses. Intriguingly, this scholarship points in unexpected ways to the foundational roles played by official international diplomacy in evoking New Negro race representation. J. Martin Favor has astutely pointed toward New Negro writers who sought to write themselves “into a folk positionality” which thereby created an aura of authenticity linking them to the larger racial constituency they sought to represent (12). Favor describes a New Negro culture in which individuals attempted to speak as rather than for Negroes, a pose permitting speakers to “assert their own unique set of circumstances…rather than adhering to a specific representational protocol” (11). If, as Favor implies, the New Negro era saw an impulse toward individual expression that competed with a demand for following representational protocol, then I would argue that the demands of protocol arose in part through numerous New Negro interactions with the strictures of official international relations. Through years of work as US diplomatic and consular officials, major race representatives including Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, and John Stephens Durham helped promote an intense and reciprocal relationship between the protocols of international relations and New Negro strategies for interracial relations.

Offering a genealogy that is in some ways allied with Favor’s, Barbara Foley has pointed toward the volkish tropes of region and soil as assuming special significance in the New Negro representational matrix. Foley describes New Negro writers as relying on metaphors of soil to evoke a metonymic nationalism, a nationalism asserting “that African Americans might ‘stand for’ the nation as ably as any other group—that they might figure metonymically to signify the whole” (ix). At one point, Foley illustrates metonymic nationalism’s rootedness in the soil by quoting from James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Fifty Years” (1913), which argues that

This land is ours by right of birth,

This land is ours by right of toil.

We helped to turn its virgin earth

Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.³

As Foley accurately points out, Johnson here relies on earth and soil to argue for black “inclusion within the inherited system of property ownership” (192). But what of the international and metonymically nationalistic performance that Johnson was engaging in as he wrote this poem? “Fifty Years” was composed, after all, while Johnson toiled far from US soil. He wrote it while working as a US consul in Nicaragua, where his dual status as a metonymic US representative and a metonymic race representative permitted international diplomacy to provisionally frame African Americans as representative of the nation.⁴ This provisional framing, as chapter 2 discusses, equipped Johnson with a set of diplomatic methods he imported into the Harlem Renaissance.

In gesturing toward the diplomatic contexts of Favor’s and Foley’s narratives of New Negro representation, I am interested in drawing attention to the ways in which even the most seemingly domestic of representational mechanisms (i.e., folk and soil) have come into dialogue with and been undergirded by the internationalist formations produced by racial and literary representation’s convergence with official diplomatic representation.⁵ Examining the converging literary and diplomatic work of the black writer-diplomats opens new vistas in relation to what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett have described as New Negro politics, a critical paradigm emphasizing the intense interdependencies of the politics of New Negro aesthetic representation and the culture of New Negro political representation (6–7). While Gates and Jarrett point specifically toward a New Negro political culture involving legislative and judicial efforts as well as Garveyism and left-wing radicalism (6, 8–9), their casual description of Alain Locke’s “ambassadorial status” (8) is a reminder that the ambassadorial tradition in African American writing has remained uninterrogated in relation to one of the New Negro era’s major arenas of political culture. This political culture operated on the planetary scale of official internationalism, and it became co-constitutive with the cultural politics of New Negro artistic ambassadorship.

1. The Negro Beat: “Distinguished Colored Men” and Their Representative Characters

Frederick Douglass has been credited with many firsts, but when President Benjamin Harrison appointed him US minister to Haiti in July 1889, he was by no means the first black US diplomat. With African Americans’ postbellum emergence as a voting constituency, US presidents and other officials looked for visible means of courting the so-called Negro vote, and appointing black diplomats functioned to curry favor with black voters while capitulating to the prejudices of white Americans who disliked seeing black citizens assume positions of prominence inside the United States. The first African American diplomat of this era was Ebenezer Don Carlos Basset, appointed minister to Haiti in 1869. Two years later, Basset was followed by John Milton Turner, who became the minister to Liberia. For decades thereafter, Haiti and Liberia remained the particular—and only—preserves of black US citizens working as diplomatic ministers. Meanwhile, African American consuls were sent to a wider variety of posts, but they nonetheless tended to find themselves working in regions of color.¹ These black nations and regions of color became known in State Department circles as the “Negro beat” or “Negro circuit.”²

When in 1889 Douglass became a black appointee within the State Department’s Negro beat, he was already well acquainted with the role of representative. Douglass had long been famous as African America’s preeminent spokesperson and representative, with the successes of his life taken by many people as proof of the nobility and capacity of African Americans more generally. In many ways, his late-life appointment to represent the United States in Haiti seemed to affirm and cement the representative tenor of his life, but as this chapter later explains, his diplomatic work in the Caribbean produced a crisis of representation among many white US citizens, leading to his premature resignation in 1891.

Operating in the context of a much later crisis of representation, recent literary critics have also been concerned with Douglass’s status as a representative. Bringing focus to the constructed and nonessential quality of Douglass’s enduring position as a race representative, Deborah E. McDowell and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have genealogized and critiqued an ingrained commonplace that situates Douglass as the representative head and father of the African American literary tradition. Clearly, argue McDowell and Gates, the representative persona that Douglass self-consciously constructed during his lifetime is too often taken as natural by today’s literary-critical establishment, which leads toward a disproportionate emphasis on Douglass and an undue marginalization of many other early African American writers.³ Though such observations arise specifically in response to the ways the African American literary tradition has been assessed, they nonetheless hold true for scholarly approaches to black participation in the United States’ international diplomacy. Douglass was one of many figures participating in the State Department’s Negro beat, but his diplomatic work has received more consideration in scholarly articles, book chapters, and other publications than that of any other black US diplomat. He stands alone as the only African American diplomat whose oeuvre of State Department dispatches has been collected and published in book form.⁴

To be sure, Douglass’s work as a US minister must be regarded as a significant moment within the trajectory of African American participation in US diplomacy. His fame brought then (as it does now) heightened visibility to his work in Haiti, and his final autobiography, Life and Times (1893), was the first African American autobiography to address its author’s work as a US diplomat. But informed by the literary-critical preoccupation with the limits of Douglass’s representative capacity, I want to refrain from positioning his diplomatic and autobiographical work as a mythic and emblematic beginning for African American literature and culture’s interactions with official internationalism. Rather, Douglass’s ambassadorship must be regarded as one of many constitutive elements within a rich tradition that will remain far from finding adequate summary or representation in any one figure. Accessing this tradition requires Douglass’s supplementation. Drawing increased attention toward writings by figures including John Mercer Langston, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, John Stephens Durham, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt contributes to a view of an early New Negro political culture that framed diplomatic service as a singularly important means for African American men to attain or affirm their status as race representatives. As these writings reveal, however, status as an American representative abroad did not convert easily into status as a representative American at home.

From “Negro Representatives” to “Representative Negroes”

During a lecture given shortly after the Civil War, Douglass lamented that “great actions” by people of African descent “have not been sufficient to change the general estimate formed of the colored race.” Explaining this insufficiency, he remarked that white Americans had denied any representational link between highly accomplished African Americans and the United States’ larger black population: “the public…has sternly denied the representative character of our distinguished men. They are treated as exceptions, individual cases, and the like” (Life and Writings 4: 179). Douglass’s postbellum lecture treads on the same ground as Richard Wright’s later account of the New Negro era’s “artistic ambassadors.” Both writers describe a group of distinguished African Americans who perform for a predominantly white US public with the hope of changing the public’s perception of the United States’ larger black population. As these distinguished figures perform in the court of American public opinion, they are treated as what Douglass calls “exceptions, individual cases” or as what Wright calls “poodles who do clever tricks” (“Blueprint” 53). Yet in spite of Douglass’s and Wright’s analogous accounts of the black presence within the US public sphere, their narratives evince preoccupations that diverge from each other in ways that are structured by a contrast between retrospect and prospect. In reading the New Negro era retrospectively, Wright describes distinguished African Americans as “ambassadors,” a term presupposing their representative capacity. Douglass, in contrast, speaks from a position of prospect, some years before the full emergence of the ambassadorial tradition that Wright disparages. Douglass does not have the luxury of assuming a representational link between African America’s “distinguished men” and the nation’s black masses. Hence, while Wright’s retrospective account speaks condescendingly of the race representatives’ decorum, recourse to Douglass’s lecture reminds us that the question of representative character—or the very ambassadorship of Wright’s New Negro ambassadors—has been a central point of struggle and contestation among the United States’ black and white populations. This conflict over representation was a central concern of Douglass’s life project, as he spent his career working to affirm his own representative character, without which, he knew, even his greatest successes must remain disconnected from the masses of African Americans.⁵

In ways that are less immediately evident than Wright’s reliance on the trope of ambassadorship, Douglass’s use of the term representative character draws on the conventions of international diplomacy in its description of African America’s relations with the white US public. The theory of “representative character,” in fact, has been foundational to—and to a large extent innovated by—the very notion of ambassadorship. As international law scholar Jeffrey K. Walker explains, “Very early in the history of the use of envoys, dating back at least to the Greeks, a general norm arose based on religious precepts that envoys of all kinds…stood in the shoes of—indeed were an extension of the person of—the sovereign who sent them” (244). By the eighteenth century, this “envoy-sovereign relationship” was “widely known as representative character,” and while the Enlightenment largely purged the trope of its basis in religion, the notion of representative character persisted as the “legal fiction” that representationally bound diplomatic envoys to their sovereigns and states (252). According to this fiction, “the relationship of the ambassador to his principal was so close that an injury to the ambassador was deemed to have been inflicted upon his prince” (Ogdon 54).

The diplomatic theory of representative character maintained international and cultural currency throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth—with the prince becoming, in the American context, the democratically elected president or more generally the sovereign nation itself. Mark Twain drew on this fiction in his short story “Diplomatic Pay and Clothes” (1899), in which the narrator asserts that diplomats must be adequately paid and appropriately dressed because “our representative is…the Republic. He is the United States of America” (402). James Weldon Johnson also alluded to this diplomatic fiction in his autobiography, which recounts an episode during which Johnson accidentally captures at gunpoint a delegate of the Nicaraguan president. The delegate charges Johnson “with having placed under arrest the President of Nicaragua,” and Johnson concedes this point as “virtually true” (Along 280), or true via the fiction of representative character. Explaining the political ramifications of representative character, novelist and diplomat George Washington Ellis wrote to a friend that when a representative’s “rank is that of ambassador he represents the person of the President and violence toward him is casus belli.”⁶ In this relationship of virtual oneness between the representative and the represented, the nation’s wishes and ambitions theoretically determine the representative’s speech during a diplomatic encounter; however, in what Jacques Derrida might describe as a perverse spirit of supplementarity, the fiction of representative character permits the representative’s status virtually to determine the status of the nation.⁷ Or—as highlighted in Twain’s, Johnson’s, and Ellis’s writings—an impoverished, captive, or assaulted representative reconstitutes the nation itself as impoverished, captive, or assaul...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Politics of New Negro Literary Culture and the Culture of US International Politics
• Part I. Representative Characters: The New Negro’s Representative Elements and Official Internationalism
• 1. The Negro Beat: “Distinguished Colored Men” and Their Representative Characters
• 2. Passing into Diplomacy: US Consul James Weldon Johnson and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Part II. Lost Theaters: Black Transnationalism and a New Negro Politics of Immanence
• 3. Diplomatic and Modern Representations: George Washington Ellis, Henry Francis Downing, and the Myth of Africa
• 4. Metonymies of Absence and Presence: Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel
• Part III. Hip-to-macy: New Negro Internationalism and American Studies
• 5. Diplomats but Ersatz: The Hip-to-matic Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida Gibbs Hunt
• 6. The Practice of Hip-to-macy in the Age of Public Diplomacy: Richard Wright’s Indonesian Travels
• Epilogue: Hipster Diplomacy’s Fall and Barack Obama’s Forms of Things Unknown
• Notes
• Works Cited