Mediating Black Modernisms: Charles S. Johnson and His Circle, Printing Opportunity and Performing the New Negro

Abstract

This dissertation explores Black American citizenship and liberal subjecthood, as they were envisioned, defined, and performed during the early twentieth century by the artists, activists, and amateur intellectuals of the New Negro movement, by centering and promoting the work and lived experience of sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson (1893-1956). As a writer, editor, and organizer of public events, Johnson, who founded the journal Opportunity (1923-1949) and whose work was foundational for other publications, proved himself an irreplicable, if so far underappreciated, member of the New Negro community. Through an appropriately multimedia investigation of his work against a background of modernist New Negro activity, this dissertation narrates Johnson and his peers’ evolving performances of personhood and the development of Black publics through print and performance. My case studies include plays, periodicals, public dinners, and private journals. Drawing on Johnson’s career, I argue that the construction of Black modern personhood in the twentieth century cannot be properly captured by focusing solely on one medium: instead, the complexities of Black personhood and of Black intellectuals’ contribution to liberal thought and its embodied practices are best revealed through an interdisciplinary analysis across a number of mediums.