Black Skin, White Tissues

Local Color and Universal Solvents in the Novels of Charles Johnson

Bibliographic Data

ID3133727
AuthorsRichard Hardack (corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume22
Issue4
Pages1028-1053
Publication date1999-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCallaloo (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cal.1999.0165
OpenAlexW2081534884
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited17

Black Skin, White Tissues: Local Color and Universal Solvents in the Novels of Charles Johnson Richard Hardack* (bio) 1. Black Skin In his postmodern novels Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage—and in passing, Faith and the Good Thing, Johnsonian pun intended—Charles Johnson implies that African Americans lacked access to a Jacksonian self during the American Renaissance. As such they were dispossessed of a transcendentalism rightly theirs—what Johnson at times characterizes as a pre-Western, unmediated relationship with Being or Nature. 1 Having no property-based self-identity to transcend, African-American men and women were denied access to a putative pre-Western unity of being, access white male transcendentalists pursuing Jacksonian selves can only problematically feign. Johnson asserts that slavers brought over not just slaves, but a shape-shifting African god to the new world (paralleling Ishmael Reed's arguments about Osiris/Pan and American pantheism in Mumbo Jumbo). In Middle Passage, Johnson's white transcendental ship carries an entire transcendental African culture stowed away in its hold (which Johnson claims to set free): this transcendentalism of the African Allmuseri tribe is configured as unified, opposed to the dualistic transcendentalism of white Americans. In Johnson, an Allmuseri unity of being then lies behind one facet of Emersonian transcendentalism. 2 While trying himself to transcend or dismantle the category of race, Johnson also here implies that white Americans brought Africans to this country not to get bodies, but culture, a move whites systematically deny and try to invert. I particularly want to focus on how Johnson grapples with the way Being in America is racialized, but also asserts that Being completely transcends race. Like Emerson, Johnson believes that all matter and nature, from his body to slavery, are only reflections of mind, finally indicating a phenomenological rather than historical state: Johnson consistently echoes Emerson's claims about the metaphysical status of slavery. Despite his heartfelt anti-slavery writings, Emerson was rarely able to address the issue of race except as a metaphysical condition. 3 When Emerson, throughout his works, purports that universal ideas, rather than specific actions, [End Page 1028] reform society, he displays transcendentalism's American tendency to bury history and politics beneath the facade of the eternal: even read against the context of the categorical imperative and enlightenment philosophy, it is still chilling to read Emerson claim, "He is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral whose aim or motive may become a universal rule." 4 One primary effect of Emerson's rhetoric is to condemn any political action, any partiality, which includes race, as unidealistic and immoral. Emerson therefore insists in "Self-Reliance" that he has "other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man": furthermore, just as "prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious," so too "he who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not a special benefit." 5 This dramatically unqualified condemnation of the practical operation of American politics supports the claim that reform makes the universal particular, fragments the whole to parts, or parses the perfect infinite to the flawed individual. In his novels, Johnson resuscitates not just Emerson's transcendentalism, but his troubling political "idealism" regarding race and history. For Johnson, the transcendence of particularity or relativism is equivalent to the transcendence of race itself. I need to make several provisos before I start: as a neo-phenomenologist, Johnson doesn't really believe in history (which, from his perspective, would make any dispute of his historical framework the rhetorical equivalent of rebuking Emerson for inconsistency). I also acknowledge that it's particularly difficult to critique Johnson's idiosyncratic and seemingly inconsistent notions of race, for he doesn't embrace standard definitions of individual identity either, and we can get caught in a chicken and egg game of which comes first, "individual" or "racial" identity. Johnson is suspicious of all "diversity," or multiplicity, which for him produces relativism and cancels philosophical unity or oneness with the world. For all 'intentionalist' purposes, I should also note that Johnson—trained in Western and African philosophy, Asian religion, and creative as well as

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Faith · Harlem Renaissance · Innocence · Literature · Performance art · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Theology · Transcendental number · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Literature and Humor Studies · History · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies

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