“Passing for White, Passing for Man”: Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as Transgender Narrative

Conventional wisdom suggests that autobiographies tell us three things about its subject: who they are, what they have done, and how that has shaped their outlook on the future. But James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Autobiography) is not an autobiography (Johnson [1912]/1965). As a novel about passing, it inverts the logic of autobiography by providing a narrative that stages the social world personified in the individual rather than an individual’s story illuminating larger aspects of society. Its nameless protagonist relates to us a set of cultural logics circulating at the turn of the twentieth century, including pervasive ideologies about race, mobility, industrialization, class, sexuality and gender. Autobiography’s reception, popular and critical, contemporaneous and contemporary, reveals the kinds of assumptions its readers make about its protagonist and the text’s social contexts. Although numerous scholars (e.g., Goellnicht 1996; Rottenberg 2004; Sheehy 1999) have discussed the complexities of racial, sexual and even generic passing in Autobiography, few have attended to the novel’s complex renderings of gender and the figurative changes in gender identification that remap the literary terrains traversed in the novel for the unnamed protagonist. Reading Autobiography as a text explicitly concerned with the process of gender self-fashioning not only supplements a critical gap in the literature but also provides contemporary theorists an opportunity to think critically through the implications of gender identity in African-American modernist literary traditions. In her reading of Autobiography Heather Andrade (2006) suggests that Johnson’sintention in Autobiography is to satirize the trope of racial uplift popular among his black male literary contemporaries.1 She argues that Johnson inverts the black uplift narrative by writing a protagonist that chooses self-interest over self-sacrifice: “as such, while other works reveal the hero’s growing racial awareness, Johnson’s Autobiography plots the anti-hero’s movement toward racial disengagement”(Andrade 2006: 2). Andrade draws on Johnson’s autobiography, Along this Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (Johnson [1933]/2008), to demonstrate how Autobiography serves as a narrative of gender passing, i.e., the narrator’s anti-hero narrative must be read as troubling contemporaneous ideas about race and gender. Similarly, Martin Summers explains that “Johnson’s portrayal of ‘passing’ is a particularly gendered one and reveals how black middle-class men negotiated their masculine identities within a society and culture dominated by white middleclass males” (Summers 2004: 208). According to Summers, Autobiography should also be understood as a narrative that stages the protagonist’s move from the raced (as black) space of creative expression to the rational (read: white) space of the marketplace: “By rejecting these cultural and ‘racial’ characteristics of his African American heritage through his entrance into the rational marketplace, the protagonist is also rejecting his biological and cultural connection to a ‘feminine’ race” (210). Summers begins an argument about the relationships among race, biology,gender identity, and passing that requires further interrogation. While Summers focuses on sites of production-creative and industrial-to map out a terrain of shifting dynamics of racialized masculinity in Autobiography, I examine key moments of gender crossing in the novel itself. Focusing on depictions of the narrator’s site-conditioned sight in Autobiography, I argue that the unnamed protagonist not only professes a longing for whiteness but for femininity as well. As such, I am explicitly focusing on the “ex-” prefix in Johnson’s title as a generative marker for gender identification as well as race, heightening our attention to the imbrications of these two discursive processes. To be “ex-”, I argue, is to understand the experience of being without legible, stable, and coherent racial and gender identities. In examining what I call “transgender yearnings” in Johnson’s Autobiography,I draw on Jay Prosser’s work on “body narratives,” in which he argues that narratives about transsexuality bring the materiality of bodies into view and Judith Butler’s work on performativity, which specifically attends to the power of discourse to constitute what it names through citation and repetition, in order to attend to the gendered and racialized subjectivities of the protagonist. I define transgender yearnings as an expressed alignment with another gender or the articulation of “cross-gender” desire. While the literature on Autobiography has taken up certain moments in the novel to describe racial ambiguity and instances of same-sex desire (see, e.g., Clarke 1995; Ross 2004; Wallace 1997), little attention is paid to the “transgendered dynamics” of the text. I suggest that these readings of homoeroticism in Autobiography are indebted to a modernist analysis, which parallels the erasure of gender non-conformity in the consolidation of the figure of the “homosexual” occurring in sexological literature some 30 years prior to Autobiography’s appearance in 1912. Through close readings of the protagonist’s moves through geographical sites and spaces of identification, I ultimately suggest that reading Autobiography as a transgender narrative allows for a more thoroughunderstanding of the text’s critique of Afro-modernist conceptions of gender and sexuality, as well as race. Like W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois [1903]/1965) and BookerT. Washington’s Up from Slavery (Washington [1907]/1965), Autobiography is a palimpsest of literary forms. As a novel, it relies most heavily on memoir but also draws upon the genres of travel logs, political tracts, and blues historiography. In broad strokes, Autobiography explains how its unnamed protagonist chooses to live as an ex-colored man after living as a person of color throughout parts of the United States and Europe. As Richard Kostelanetz explains, “The novel’s theme is the many ambiguities of passing-moral, political, emotional; and its predominant action is the narrator’s shifting sympathies for white and black identity” (Kostelanetz 1991: 20). As my chapter addresses, the notion of shifting sympathies applies to gender (and sexuality) in addition to race. Following the chronology of the novel, which is to say that the beginning is the end, I chart various instances in which the unnamed narrator describes sites/sights of identification that constitute the narrator’s “practical joke on society” and presents a critical terrain for scholars interested in charting the ramifications of gender identity in African-American modernist literature ([1912]/ 1965: 29).