Johnson, James Weldon,--1871-1938--Autobiography of an ex-coloured man

There is much disagreement and uncertainty among critics over the message in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. It has been misconstrued as a "passing novel" or as another novel with the "tragic mulatto" theme. In James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man the double consciousness of the protagonist reveals the central concerns Johnson had about racial identity and individual psychology. The protagonist's choices are between isolation and integration, the central issue in Johnson's later published pamphlet Negro Americans What Now? He believed that successful integration could occur through the arts and education. By the protagonist's revealing that he is capable of experiencing negative capability in Europe, Johnson describes the atmosphere to be striven for in America through social change.

The question of hybridity is a complex social issue that commonly addresses agendas of heart, politics, and mind. It is a question that is both deeply personal and overtly political and addresses the entire spectrum of American society. Hybridity, in my view, can be used to interrogate a society rooted in ideas of race definition. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Jean Toomer's Cane, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man depict the struggles of the mixed-race characters as they seek an identity of wholeness through attempting to live up to a social prescription of sameness. These characters wander in search of a raceless society; they cross boundaries of language and live in silence in a dichotomized world of public conformity and private duality despite their efforts to unite the two.