Impressive discovery, J.W. Johson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912 (from The Norton Anthology of Af Am Literature, HL Gates Jr ed, 2004 2nd ed°). Starting to etch out a sense of timeline in African American literature, and a sense of generations of context. (He himself mentions Du Bois's 1903 The Souls as one recent landmark, groundbreaking.)
His Book of American Negro Poetry is 1921.
His refined and settled tone; his singular "peripapetic" experience across cultural & social boundaries (with which vectors); his careful differencitations of black experience and social-cultural history.
Mots d'ordre déjà posés à l'époque, ou posés ici : the color line (827), "the freemasonry of the race" (830), the generations of "struggle" - consecutive frontline issues of the souls of Negroes, the learning capacities of Negroes, and the social recognition of Negroes, "the Negro question" (831).
How "nigger" among blacks means "fellow", and even endearment. / "The Anglos-Saxon race".
"The Negro is progressing".
Literature : " dialect speaking 'darkies' " 866, "the rural darkie", "are perhaps better known in American literature than any other single picture of our national life. Indeed, they form an ideal and exclusively literary concept of the American Negro to such an extent that it is almost impossible to get the reading public to recognize him in any other setting", "overworked and hackneyed descriptions", "This generally accepted literary ideal of the American Negro constitutes what is really an obstacle in the way of the thought and progressive element of the race." - "happy-go-lucky, laughing, shuffling, banjo-picking" 866, alternatives, "looked upon as an absurd caricature of "white civilization", "would be taken in a comic-opera sense".
=> "However this very fact constitutes the opportunity of the future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown, in depicting the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of those of their race whar are striving to break the narrow limits of tradition. A beginning has already been made in that remarkable book by Dr. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk." 866
- preacher & singer figures 868, art of oratory 869.
"Music and the race question" (857). Ragtime music : its remixing of cultural territories : "popular/scholasticism" 840, "appeals universally", and its success in Europe - as "American music" : refait donc une nationalité, par les traversées, ouvertures, des cartes culturelles. He learns to play ragtime, on top of his classical training : first to make classical retranscriptions of ragtime (and that as early plan for a life's enterprise, in dealing with his peculiar B/W situation). "The old slave song" 856, "which noone has yet touched" / "the new American music". "Going home and working as a Negro composer" plan 857, "I doubt that even a white musician of recognized ability could succeed there by working on the theory that American music should be based on Negro themes" 857.
B/W relations, social history: "white slummers" in Harlem, including sexual partnerings.
871 : not yet appreciate // these old slave songs. "the day will come when this slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro".
Diaspora elements : Cuban cigar workers and learning Spanish, the European/Parisian reception - culture-making - of "new American music", cake walk and ragtime. Trip to Paris, as servant/accompagnateur, on the train of music dissemination (transnational and transmode, indissociably tied together: ragtime/classical, America/Europe, B/W), learning French (and making observations about language learning: grassroots bottom up, German later). Paris welcome to Americans (853). Trip to London : "the world's metropolis"
Becomes "a polished man of the world". (World = polished, cosmopolitanism. Other Af Ams have done the cross over to Europe on other modes of transnationalism. See possibly a history of those modes : what is available as regime of diaspora, at which time.)
Links made with situations of native Africans, with Jew (860).
Black history of cultural adaptability and self-recreation, 860, = practiced in diasporic (? this is the flip side to this) historicity of self and community : "I could not help being struck by the great difference between them and the same class of colored people in the South. In speech and thought they were genuine Yankees. The difference was especially noticeable in their speech. There was none of the heavy-tongued enunciation which characterizes event the best-educated colored people of the South. It is remarkable, after all, what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen black the West Indian gentleman in London, and he is in speech and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I hae no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with exception of the pigtail."
Politics of knowledge is one persistent key of this history. Plays out in 1964-1969, with the student insurgency that imposes Black studies in the academic game.
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