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James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography Of An Ex-Coloured Man

1322 Words6 Pages

James Weldon Johnson's book, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, is a brilliant and masterful piece of fiction written in the notion of an autobiography. Within the “autobiography,” James Weldon Johnson constructs a fabricated account of a young biracial man in turmoil with his racial identity within a highly prejudiced contemporary 19th-century America. As you would expect, the story contains numerous different themes of racial identity, sense of belonging, and even of racial “passing”. However, despite all these persistent themes, one stands out the most. The theme is music. Music emerges as a powerful motif throughout the entirety of the book. Not only do I believe that music serves as a means of escape for James’s character. However, I …show more content…

On this topic of resistance, within the book music can be portrayed as a form of artistic expression and creativity that empowers the characters in the book to assert their individuality and agency. For example, when our main character tries to express his culture through his new devout musical interest. His father states this “My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by taste, a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle, of the black people of the United States? Then look at the terrible handicap you are placing on yourself by going home and working as a Negro composer; you will never be able to get the hearing for your work which it might deserve. I doubt that even a white musician of recognized ability could succeed there by working on the theory that American music should be based on Negro themes. Music is a universal art; anybody's music belongs to everybody; you can't limit it to race or

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