First Listen:

Robert Glasper Experiment,

'Black Radio'

 

by Patrick Jarenwattananon

Hear 'Black Radio' In Its Entirety

Hear Individual Tracks From The Album

Mike Schreiber/Courtesy of the artist

Robert Glasper Experiment's new album, Black Radio, comes out Feb. 28.

February 19, 2012

In the title track of Black Radio, Yasiin Bey (nee Mos Def) muses on the supposedly indestructible "black boxes" recovered from commercial airplane crashes. It's a metaphor for the durability of substantive music, even in a turbulent time for the recording industry.

Big bird falling down a mountain pass
Only thing to survive the crash
Black radio

Of course, Black Radio is a record on which every performer is African-American, and it blares sonic signifiers of hip-hop, R&B, soul, funk and jazz at every turn. So, yeah: There are overt hints of an alternate meaning, one about pride and possibility in the tradition of black-origin popular music.

You wanna fly free, go far and fast
Built to last, we made this craft
From black radio

The Robert Glasper Experiment is uniquely qualified to handle this blues continuum with care. All four members — Robert Glasper, keys; Casey Benjamin, sax and vocoder; Derrick Hodge, bass; Chris Dave, drums — come from deep, inducted-into-the-fraternity jazz backgrounds. But in this group, they all treat "jazz" more as verb than noun, which has allowed them to freely and frequently collaborate with rappers, singers and other unclassifiables of talent. Like The Roots as the house band of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the Experiment has become a model of versatility, open-mindedness and general good music appreciation; it, too, has become one of America's premier black-music jam bands.

Hence the guest list here. Erykah Badu performs the jazz standard "Afro Blue." Lalah Hathaway does a Sade song. Ledisi writes lyrics over a Glasper tune. Chrisette Michele and Musiq Soulchild hop on a slow jam. Lupe Fiasco raps. The artist formerly known as Mos Def raps. Bilal sings Bowie. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is covered. Meshell Ndegeocello. KING. Shafiq Husayn of Sa-Ra. Stokley Williams of Mint Condition. And so on.

If there's a unifying element here, it's a quality of feeling "organic." Black Radio sounds like it was sung, spoken and played by gloriously imperfect human beings, striking real acoustic pianos and snare drums and bass guitars with hard-won finesse. It's a quality of sound which has largely disappeared in contemporary hip-hop and R&B radio — i.e., the type of radio largely marketed to black people who live in cities. But Glasper and his cohorts make the case that music which will endure in the future can have a spot in the rotation now.

Val-Inc - On (album stream)

 

Val-Inc (Val Jeanty) is a Haitian-born composer, percussionist and turntablist, who uses technology to lead listeners into her dream- like expressionism of Afro-Creole and "Afro- Electronica" compositions.

Her works invite the World of the unseen as she incorporates her African Haitian Musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics, and the archaic with the post-modern.

ARTIST STATEMENT: "I strive to create sounds that impact the psyche with esoteric noesis". Haitian electronic music composer/percussionist/turntablist, Val-Inc evokes the musical esoteric realms of the creative subconscious and self defined as "Afro-Electronica®". Her work invites the Lwas as she incorporates her African Haitian Musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics and the archaic with the post-modern.

Her solo "Afro-Electronica" installations have been showcased in New York City at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Village Vanguard and internationally at SaalFelden Music Festival in Austria, Stanser Musiktage in Switzerland, Jazz a la Villette in France, and the Biennale di Venezia Museum in Italy.

INSTRUMENTATION: Haiti:LWAS, Hands, 2 sticks, Kata drum, Manman drum, SK1-Casio, SP202-Boss, AX30B-Korg, Matrix3-Numark, QY70-Yamaha, PhotonX25-Alesis, Ethno-Motu, PDX2000-Vestax, LogicPro7-Apple, SonicPlusII-Sonor, QFO-Vestax, PowerbookG4-Apple, MPC2000-Akai, Faderboard-Vestax, NordLead-Korg, Talkingdrum-Africa, RFX300-Zoom, AirSynth-Alesis, M1-Korg, XP30-Roland, ToneWorks-Korg, Pro-Tools7-Digidesign, Eurorack1604-Behringer, Reason3/4-Proppellerheads, MPC500-Akai, XP 100-Digitech, Boss RC-50, SP 303-Boss... a vivid cosmic haitian imagination...

Links
http://www.val-inc.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Val-Inc-Afro-Electronica/153825217975639
http://www.myspace.com/valincmusic
http://soundcloud.com/vjeanty

 

The Patricia Dobler Poetry Award 

This contest is open to women writers* over the age of 40 who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, currently living in the U.S., who have not published a full-length book of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction.

 

CONTEST RULES

• Open to women writers* over the age of 40 who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, currently living in the United States, who have not published a full-length book of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction (chapbooks excluded)
• Each poem must be unpublished, up to 75 lines/poem
• Up to two poems, of any style, per submission
• Submissions must be postmarked by or before April 2, 2012
• Submissions received after April 9, 2012 will not be accepted, regardless of postmark date
• Winner will be notified by April 24, 2012

With each two-poem submission, submit the following:

• Cover sheet with name, address, phone number, E-mail, titles of poems
• Check/money order for $20, made payable to Carlow University
• Clearly addressed, standard-letter-sized self-addressed, stamped envelope for notification

The author’s name, address, and any identifying information should not appear on any poem.

All entries will receive a copy of Voices from the Attic.

Primary Judge: Jan Beatty
Final Judge: Toi Derricotte

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CONTACT INFORMATION

Send entries to:

The Patricia Dobler Poetry Award
Jan Beatty, director of Creative Writing
Carlow University
3333 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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AWARD INFORMATION

The winner will receive the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, in the form of round-trip travel and lodging as a participating guest of Carlow's MFA residency in Pittsburgh, Pa, January 3-13, 2013; publication in Voices from the Attic; and a reading at Carlow University with judge Toi Derricotte.

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>> About Patricia Dobler

 

For more information, please contact Ellie Wymard, PhD, at 412-578-6346, or Sarah Williams-Devereux at 412-578-6346 or sewilliams412@carlow.edu.

 

*Current Carlow students or employees are not eligible.

The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition Is Still Open

Written by Administrator

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Randall Jarrell NORTH CAROLINA--The North Carolina Writers' Network is still accepting submissions for the 2012 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. This contest honors the late poet Randall Jarrell and is administered by Terry L. Kennedy and the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition accepts one-poem submissions. The contest awards the winner $200, publication in the Crucible literary journal, and an invitation to read his or her poetry at UNC-Greensboro’s Founders Day activities. The Final Judge is Maria Hummell. She is the author of the novel Wilderness Run (St. Martin's) and the chapbook City of the Moon (Harperprints). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Narrative, and Creative Nonfiction. Her awards include the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award (2009), runner-up for The Iowa Review Creative Nonfiction Prize (2010), and a Pushcart Prize (2011). This year, she is coordinating and teaching in the Creative Nonfiction program at Stanford University. Charlotte Observer writer Dannye Romine Powell won the 2011 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition for her poem “I Am the Girl.” Poet and editor Dan Albergotti chose Powell’s poem from close to 100 entries. The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition Postmark deadline: March 1 (annual) Submissions accepted: January 15 – March 1 Eligibility and Guidelines:   The competition is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Submissions should be one poem only (40-line limit). Poem must be typed (single-spaced) and stapled in the left-hand corner. Author's name should not appear on the poem. Instead, include a separate cover sheet with author's name, address, e-mail address, phone number, and poem title. Poem will not be returned. Include a self-addressed stamped envelope for a list of winner and finalists. The winner and finalists will be announced in May. An entry fee must accompany the poem. Multiple submissions are accepted, one poem per entry fee: $10 for NCWN members, $15 for nonmembers. You may pay member entry fee if you join the NCWN with your submission. Checks should be made payable to the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Send submissions to: Terry L. Kennedy MFA Writing Program 3302 MHRA Building UNC Greensboro Greensboro, NC 27402-6170 Questions may be directed to Terry L. Kennedy, Associate Director, MFA Writing Program, at tlkenned@uncg.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The Nigeria Prize

 

THE NIGERIA PRIZE FOR SCIENCE AND THE NIGERIA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE Literature Prize, 2012 Call for entries Science Prize, 2012 Call for entries The Nigeria Prize for Science and The Nigeria Prize for Literature are some of the most significant social contributions made by NLNG to Nigeria. We like to think of them as our gift to Nigeria. The prizes are registered charities (companies limited by guarantee) with Corporate Affairs Commission. The prizes are aimed at bringing Nigerian scientists and authors to public attention and celebrating excellence in scientific breakthroughs and literary craftsmanship in the nation. NLNG believes that the science prize will save scientists from their current low rating in national estimation; provide leaders with answers to crucial issues in development; and improve standards of living. And with the Nigeria Prize for Literature, it is expected that the quest for a prestigious prize will improve the quality of writing, editing, proof-reading, and publishing in the country with far-reaching positive effect on print and broadcast journalism. The prizes are administered, on behalf of Nigeria LNG Limited, by the Nigerian Academy of Science and Nigerian Academy of Letters. The prizes come with a prize money of $50,000 each. It started with $20,000 in 2004 and was increased in 2006 to $30,000. In 2008, it was again upped to the current amount to drive science and authorship. The prizes are awarded at the NLNG Grand Award Night which holds in the second week of October, commemorating the first export of LNG cargo by the company on October 9, 1999. Six years on, the Grand Award Night has taken a revered place in the order of social events in the country whilst honouring ingenuity in a colourful ceremony deserving of the winners. In 2004, Profesor Akpoveta Susu and his then doctoral student (now doctor) Kingsley Abhulimen, both of the University of Lagos, won the maiden edition of the science prize. They won based on their work - "Real-Time Computer Assisted Leak Detection/Location Reporting and Inventory Loss Monitoring System" - which was described by judges as an outstanding contribution to research in real-time leak detection ina network of pipelines, or other flow systems, carrying liquids. That year there was no winner for the literature prize for Prose Fiction. However, three authors, Bina Nengi-Ilagha, Omo Uwaifo and Prof Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo received honourable mention for their efforts. In 2005, there were no winners for the science prize whilst joint winners emerged fro the literature prize which focused on Poetry. Ezenwa Ohaeto and Gabriel Okara were awarded for their books Chants of a Minstrel and The Dreamer: His Vision respectively. Professor Michael Adikwu in 2006 showed in his winning work, "Wound Healing Devices (Formulations) Containing Snail Mucin," that snails mucins can play a key role in the pharmaceutical industry as a drug delivery agent. Dr Ahmed Yerima claimed the prize in literature (drama) for his book Hard Ground. Again, in 2007 there was no winner for the science prize and joint winners emerged for the litereature prize on children's literature. Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Mabel Segun won with their books, My Cousin Sammy and Readers' Theatre: Twelve Plays for Young People. Dr Ebenezer Meshida emerged winner of the 2008 science prize with his work "Solution to Road Pavement Destabilisation by the Invention of 'Lateralite': A Stabilisation Flux for Fine Grained Lateritic Soils" which will make Nigerian roads durable through the elimination of potholes, gullies and erosion. The literature prize in 2008 returned to Prose Fiction. In 2008, Kaine Agary won the prize with her first book, Yellow Yellow. The 6th year of the prizes saw Professor Andrew Nok winning the science prize in 2009 for his ground-breaking discovery of the gene responsible for the creation of Sialidase (SD) an enzyme which causes sleeping sickness (Trypanosomiasis). No winner emerged for the Literature prize. An unprecendented media furor ensued as a result of the judges decision but Nigeria LNG Limited defended the judges decision insisting on standing by the NLNG core value of excellence. In August 2010, Professor Akaehomen Ibhadode was announced as the winner for the Science Prize for his work entitled "Development of New Methods for Precision Die Design." In awarding the prize to Prof Ibhadode, the judges noted that he has made significant contributions to the field of cold forging. He developed a mathematical model for the design of forging die based on die expansion methods, an optimal procedure for the selection of the most cost effective die design. According to the judges, “In an industrializing economy like Nigeria, the products of the precision die process are particularly important in the development of small and medium scale enterprises on which the economy depends for its accelerated growth. He has applied the methods not only for the steel industry but also for the development of aluminium products.” The competition for the literature prize proved to be one of the most exciting so far; the three shortlisted contestants were writers of considerable repute: Adinoyi-Ojo Onukaba for his book The Killing Swamp, Esiaba Irobi for Cemetery Road and Ahmed Yerima  for Little Drops … The late Esiaba Irobi eventually stole the day, bagging a post-mortem laurel to crown his achievements.

Why it matters that our politicians are rich

Science is finding that money actually changes how you think and act—and not for the better

By Britt Peterson

February 19, 2012

 

 

 

Chip Wass for the Boston Globe

 

As the presidential primary race has unfolded over the last few months, curious Americans have angled for a look at the candidates’ wallets—and observed that they are bulging. There’s Newt Gingrich, with his $7 million fortune and an up to $1 million revolving line of credit at Tiffany. The relentlessly anti-elitist Rick Santorum disclosed last week that he earns roughly $1 million a year. Mitt Romney built an immense $200 million fortune through his “corporate raider” work at Bain Capital; even Ron Paul, who claimed in one debate that he was embarrassed to show his tax forms because he made so much less money than his rivals, is worth as much as $5.2 million.

This striking wealth among politicians goes beyond the GOP. One of these four men will face off against the now wealthy Barack Obama, whose book royalties alone ran to $2.5 million in 2008. Beyond the Oval Office, there’s Congress, whose members have a median net worth of $913,000, compared with $100,000 for the rest of us, according to a recent New York Times report. (Massachusetts’ own John Kerry is one leader of the pack, with a fortune that in 2009 was estimated at $167 million.)

Politicians would like us to believe that all this money doesn’t matter in a deeper sense—that what matters is ideas, skills, and leadership ability. Aside from a little extra business savvy, they’re regular people just like the rest of us: They just happen to have more money.

 

Related

Photos

Current politicians and their wealth

 

But is that true? In fact, a number of new studies suggest that, in certain key ways, people with that much money are not like the rest of us at all. As a mounting body of research is showing, wealth can actually change how we think and behave—and not for the better. Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them. They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble. And they are more likely to defend an unfair status quo. If you think you’d behave differently in their place, meanwhile, you’re probably wrong: These aren’t just inherited traits, but developed ones. Money, in other words, changes who you are.

As voters consider which presidential candidate to support in November, one thing is for sure: Whoever wins is going to have money and power to spare. In a world where our politicians are inevitably better off than most of the people they govern, the new research sheds fresh light on the nature of our elected leaders—and offers insight into why they so often seem oblivious to our problems. And, given that some of us may one day build a successful business or win the lottery, it also begins to offer some hints of how we might face down the corrupting influence of wealth and power ourselves.

***

HERE IN THE home of the American dream, most people are convinced that gaining a lot of money or changing social status abruptly wouldn’t change who they are as people. Think about all the books, movies, and TV shows where a poor or middle-class person is suddenly elevated to a high position. Typically, his basic humility and decency shine through the trappings of power: “The Prince and the Pauper,” Matthew Crawley on “Downton Abbey,” John Goodman in “King Ralph.”

Psychology has now found ways to test that narrative, however, and basic decency is not coming out on top. There are two ways to gauge the difference between how wealthy and nonwealthy people think: You can make people temporarily feel rich (or prompt them to think about money) and see if that creates changes, or you can sample rich and nonrich people and see if they think differently to begin with. Both kinds of studies yield results that point in the same somewhat disturbing direction.

Kathleen Vohs, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, started working on the issue of “feeling rich” in 2006 along with coauthors Nicole Mead and Miranda Goode. In their research, subjects were given subliminal suggestions to think about money—a clue in a descrambling puzzle, a dollar-bill screensaver on a computer screen, a sheaf of Monopoly bills on a table—before being asked to make a number of decisions: How soon do you ask for help on an impossible drawing task? Do you help the clumsy lab assistant who just dropped all her pencils? Do you donate to a made-up charity? Do you choose to work in a team or alone?

The mere hint of money, the researchers found, made people less likely to ask for help, less helpful in gathering the lab assistant’s pencils, significantly less generous to the made-up charity, and far less likely to look for teammates. “When people are reminded of money, they get better at pursing their personal goals,” Vohs said. “On the negative side, they become poor at interpersonal functioning. They’re not all that nice to be around. They’re not openly mean or disagreeable, but they can be insensitive.”

Insensitivity can cover a range of sins, from the minor (being unhelpful) to the more serious—say, treating others like they are less than human. Further studies by Vohs and her colleagues have shown that prompting people to think about money—a technique known as “priming”—makes them less likeable and friendly, and more likely to agree with statements that support an unjust, social-Darwinist status quo (for example, “Some groups of people are simply inferior to others”). In a particularly disturbing part of one study, the team primed people with money, then gauged their empathy by eliciting reactions to a theoretical scenario involving a belligerent homeless person. The researchers offered the subjects a chance to agree with statements that dehumanized others (“Some people deserve to be treated like animals”). The money-primed group was more likely to agree.

Vohs and her collaborators have proposed a number of explanations for this effect. Adam Waytz, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a coauthor on the dehumanization study, describes the energy that fuels altruism as a “finite resource”—one that you tap only when you’re worried about your own needs in turn. “What money does...is, it obviates the need for others,” Waytz said. “When you have feelings of security, there’s no extra motivation to spend your resources for compassion on other people.”

The prompts to think of money in Vohs’s experiments are meant to approximate the reassuring effect of wealth, permitting her team to test those primed to think of money against those who haven’t been. What about people who are actually rich, and not just prompted to think about wealth in a lab? Other psychologists, like one team associated with the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, have conducted experiments that measure responses in people based on their actual affluence—and have found closely complementary results.

In 2009, Michael Kraus, Paul Piff, and Dacher Keltner, all then of Berkeley (Kraus is now at University of California, San Francisco), published research that divided up sample groups by family income as well as self-reported socioeconomic status. People of higher socioeconomic status were more likely to explain success or failure as a result of individual merit or fault; lower-class people, on the other hand, felt less control in their own lives and were more likely to blame events on circumstance. In other words, higher-status people were more likely to feel that they’d earned their high place in society, and that poorer people hadn’t.

More recently, similar research—involving not just surveys, but heart-rate measurements —has found that higher-status people tend to be less compassionate toward others in a bad situation than people of lower-class backgrounds.

“If your world is more unpredictable and threatening, and the police are more likely to arrest you, and you’re more likely to go to schools that don’t have the right kinds of resources, you’re going to be more attuned to the context around you,” Keltner explained. “And if [lower-status people are] more attuned to the environment and they’re tracking other people, it turns out they’re more compassionate, too, even at the physiological level.”

The result of these differences, say researchers who work on money and social class, is that people who are confident in their status have a completely different worldview from those who lack that confidence: more self-involved, self-justifying, and even, as the dehumanization study suggests, crueler. And the higher up the spectrum you get, the stronger the effect: “It’s on a continuum,” Kraus said. In other words, a subject whose family income is over $75,000 will show more compassion and generosity than a subject with a family income over $150,000, and less than a subject with an income of $30,000.

You might think that electing poor or low-status people to positions of power could help solve the problem, but it turns out not to be so easy: Power itself can trigger similar changes. Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap, psychologists at the business schools of Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia, respectively, have shown that merely standing in a powerful position (arms crossed behind head, for example), releases an intense rush of testosterone while inhibiting the stress hormone cortisol. Among other things, this hormonal cocktail encourages people to follow their own self-interest and ignore external cues (others’ distress, say) that might slow them down.

Gaining a sense of power, then, even if it happens through random selection in a lab, alters you on a very basic level, making you “less attentive to others, more free to act, and more free to act in a way that doesn’t take account of other people,” said Adam Galinsky, a psychologist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management who has been studying the effects of power for a decade.

So it’s all very well for us to curse our wealthy senators for their insensitivity. If we think we’re immune from these kinds of changes—that, if given their money and power, we would all be benevolent dictators—we are probably fooling ourselves.

***

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS of realizing that our wealthy leaders may be more callous, self-absorbed, and self-justifying than the people they represent? For one thing, it suggests that the constant calls for candidates to release tax returns and disclose their assets are not so petty after all.

Beyond underscoring the importance of disclosure, however, the new research also offers some hope—not just for Rich Uncle Moneybags, but for you, if you happen to win a Senate election. As Galinsky explained, power doesn’t necessarily turn everyone cruel: It merely reveals their true colors. With power comes disinhibition, which can have the counterintuitive effect of turning a run-of-the-mill billionaire into a major philanthropist. “Power...frees you to act like your true self,” Galinsky said. “So let’s say the lascivious become even more flirtatious, but those people that are concerned with compassionate goals become even more compassionate and even more generous.”

And there’s more hope for rich or powerful people who want to avoid becoming insensitive jerks: Compassion, at least, can be taught. In a 2010 study, Kraus, Keltner, and several of their colleagues showed subjects one of two videos—a neutral clip from “All the King’s Men” or a short documentary about child poverty—before administering a written “compassion test” and an interpersonal test of compassion in which the subject had to divide a set of tasks of varying lengths between himself and a partner. Although the subjects with higher class status tended to assign the longer tasks to the partner, the researchers found that watching the child-poverty video canceled out the effect of social class.

Whether a given person will take on the challenge of cultivating his own compassion, of course, is another question. In trying to guess whether a wealthy political candidate will be hard-hearted or generous in practice, then, even complete financial disclosure is not enough; as always, it’s up to us to predict how a candidate’s character will guide him in office.

If you win the lottery and want to avoid becoming an insensitive lout yourself, however, the new findings offer some solutions. Sure, you could watch lots of compassion-inducing videos. But better yet, Keltner says, “Give at least half of the money away.” Not only does charity bring happiness, but getting rid of some of that windfall might be the simplest way to stay just as kind and decent as you are right now.

Try BostonGlobe.com today and get two weeks FREE.

Britt Peterson is a writer in Washington, D.C.

 

Watch Now!

Critically Acclaimed Doc

"Joe Frazier:

When The Smoke Clears"

BY CYNTHIA REID | FEBRUARY 14, 2012

We've profiled the documentary Joe Frazier: When The Smoke Clears a few times on S&A and you can watch this critically acclaimed and revealing film now courtesy of Hulu.  I had a chance to view it and I certainly appreciated the enlighting perspective it gave.

To recap...the film takes an uprecedented look at the boxer's life covering his roots in South Carolina’s Gullah community to his international fame.  It also recalls his famous rivalry with Muhammad Ali.

Directed by Mike Todd, footage was completed before Frazier's death.

American Dreams:

1912, ‘The Autobiography of

an Ex-Coloured Man’

by Nathaniel Rich Feb 20, 2012 

 

In the second installment of the American Dreams series, Nathaniel Rich reads a seminal African-American novel about crossing the color line, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson. On its 100th anniversary Johnson's novel deserves recognition for its rich American themes and influence in the next generation of African-American writers.

Set with the challenge of humanizing his race for white readers, James Weldon Johnson realized that it was not enough to create a hero who was shrewd, intelligent, and valiant. His hero also had to be a conceited ass.

James Weldon Johnson., Corbis

The anonymous narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man has never encountered a skill or trade that he cannot instantly master. As a 12-year-old he discovers, after several piano lessons, that he is not merely an “infant prodigy,” but “a true artist.” Later, thanks to this “natural talent,” he becomes “a remarkable player of rag-time,” “indeed…the best rag-time player in New York”—a distinction that would place him ahead of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. Language comes to him as easily as music. After spending a year at a cigar factory, he can speak Spanish “like a native”—“In fact, it was my pride that I spoke better Spanish than many of the Cuban workmen.” In Paris, after “an astonishingly short time,” he acquires “a more than ordinary command of French”; a few months in Berlin and he’s fluent in German. The narrator enjoys flagrant successes in love (“I say, without any egotistic pride, that among my admirers were several of the best-looking women”) and money (“Concerning the position which I now hold I shall say nothing except that it pays extremely well”). There is nothing the man can’t do, in the post-Reconstruction South—except, of course, be seen on the street with a white woman, eat at a white restaurant, or be acknowledged in public by his white father.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is the first African-American novel written entirely in the first person, but Johnson did not have literary innovation in mind. He sincerely hoped that the book would pass as nonfiction. For this reason Johnson had to publish the book anonymously, since by 1912 he was already a hugely successful popular songwriter, Broadway celebrity, and the U.S. consul to Nicaragua. A cigar was named after him.

Johnson’s publishers hailed the Autobiography as the first “composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its various groups and elements, showing their relations with each other and to the whites.” This is a lofty undertaking, but in only 211 pages, Johnson does his best to make good on it. The novel takes the form of a travelogue, with the narrator’s light complexion serving as a passport that allows him to slip freely across color lines. He tours black nightclubs and gambling parlors near Times Square, a white millionaire’s Fifth Avenue apartment, poor black farming towns in central Georgia, and expat cafés in Paris and Berlin. Since he doesn’t linger very long in any place, the people he meets are never more than specters, or types: “the millionaire,” “the Pullman porter, “the Texan,” “the colored preacher.” It’s only the narrator himself who, in his flaws and contradictions, seems human.

But this is the point. Johnson vows, at the beginning of the novel, to initiate his readers into the “freemasonry of the race.” One way he accomplishes this is to reveal the profound variety and complexity of black experience in America. Racism, like any form of bigotry, is a crude simplification, reducing an entire race into a slim range of undesirable qualities. It is, as Johnson writes, a “dwarfing, warping, distorting influence” that forces all of one’s activities to “run through the narrow neck of this one funnel.” As Johnson’s narrator flits between worlds, finding easy acceptance wherever he goes, he lays bare the arbitrariness of the old racial categories. Often in these scenes—such as one in which a Southern cotton planter is flummoxed by the contradictions inherent in his own racist diatribes—Johnson’s tone shifts to mockery, a sharper knife than moral indignation.

There can be no single picture of African-Americans, just as there can be no single picture of America.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man By James Weldon Johnson. 192p. Penguin Classics. $6.10

 

Had this been the Autobiography’s only mode, Johnson would be considered today a valuable satirist and social historian of his time. But Johnson did more than that—he changed the course of American fiction. He did so by revealing the power of literature, of words, to divide a people. It is through a novel, after all, that the narrator has his first glimmer of racial consciousness. He is still in grammar school when he reads Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “It opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered me; in fact, it gave me my bearing.” The narrator returns to fiction whenever he struggles to make sense of his fractured identity. He tends not to like what he finds there:

…log cabins and plantations and dialect-speaking “darkies” are perhaps better known in American literature than any other single picture of our national life. Indeed, they form an ideal and exclusive 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…

The Autobiography is Johnson’s argument that no such thing as the “ideal and exclusive literary concept of the American Negro” exists. There can be no single picture of African Americans, just as there can be no single picture of America. This is a liberating idea, and one reason why Johnson’s novel inspired a new generation—Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, among them—to write autobiographical fiction that broadly expanded the variety of black experience depicted in literature.

In the novel’s final paragraph Johnson reveals that his narrator has decided at last to become “an ordinarily successful white man,” rather than submit himself, and his even paler-skinned children, to the indignities of racial discrimination. Here at last his vanity blisters, and flakes off. He admits that he is haunted by his decision to pass as white, for it prevents him from joining “that small but gallant band of coloured men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race.” (This is a band of men that includes, presumably, James Weldon Johnson.) The narrator’s only consolation is the memoir that he has written. It’s our consolation too. For just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave the narrator his bearing, the Autobiography helped the nation to find its own.

Other notable novels published in 1912:

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Financier by Theodore Dreiser
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson
The Reef by Edith Wharton

Bestselling novel of the year: The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter

This monthly series will chronicle the history of the American century as seen through the eyes of its novelists. The goal is to create a literary anatomy of the last century—or, to be precise, from 1900 to 2012. In each column I’ll write about a single novel and the year it was published. The novel may not be the bestselling book of the year, the most praised, or the most highly awarded—though awards do have a way of fixing an age’s conventional wisdom in aspic. The idea is to choose a novel that, looking back from a safe distance, seems most accurately, and eloquently, to speak for the time in which it was written. Other than that there are few rules. I won’t pick any stinkers.

Previous Selections:

1902—Brewster’s Millions by George Barr McCutcheon

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Nathaniel Rich is the author of The Mayor's Tongue. He lives in New Orleans.

 

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