The Mulatto and Tabooed Desires: Reading James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay interrogates the dominant discourse of a mixed-race man's sexuality under Jim Crow and its counter-discourse by exploring James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Recent scholarship on the novel presents Johnson's text as a somewhat conservative text in which the protagonist's alleged deviation from normative racial identity and heterosexuality prefigures his tragic fate. Scholars such as Siobhan B. Somerville and Phillip Brian Harper contend that Johnson's portrayal of his mulatto protagonist as a homosexual subject conforms to the logic of dominant white discourse in which homosexual and interracial sexuality are tabooed and stigmatized. Against those critical assessments of Johnson's novel as a male version of the tragic mulatta narrative, my essay argues that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges the cultural politics of racial segregation that racializes and sexualizes a light skinned black male subject. In doing so, I examine Johnson's rhetorical strategy through which, I suggest, his narrative actually troubles the racist fantasy that pathologizes the protagonist's biracial origins and sexuality. Specifically, I explore Johnson's appropriation and strategic deployment of racist stereotypes associated with a mixed-race man, arguing that Johnson's use of racist discourses criticizes rather than reifies the conservative politics that critics generally identify in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

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