Lost theaters of African American internationalism: diplomacy and Henry Francis Downing in Luanda and London.(Report)

Recent critical approaches to the global travels and connections made by African American writers and texts have revealed much regarding black internationalism's relation to artistic innovation, U. S. imperialism, and the formation of black transnational consciousnesses. At the forefront of such studies, of course, have been projects underscoring black travel and cultural work within the matrices of the Black Atlantic and the diasporan world more generally. (1) Meanwhile, complementing and entering into dialogue with diasporan studies has been the field of American Studies, which in recent years has sought to place American cultural forms into greater international and transnational perspectives. (2) Amy Kaplan's commentary on this point has been both useful and provocative, as she has called for an increased focus upon the reciprocities between the U. S.'s "domestic" cultures and "foreign" policies ("Left" 17), and, more specifically, has also called for "the subject of race and ethnicity" to be considered vis-a-vis the U. S.'s normally staid diplomatic history ("Domesticating" 104). Such suggestions, working in tandem with diasporan studies, have promoted a critical milieu whose conjoined anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-elitism have led to a productive emphasis upon the popular, resistant, and oppositional that operate within critical territory which too frequently in the past has been occupied by what Kaplan calls the international world's "policy makers" ("Domesticating" 104) and "diplomatic elites" ("Left" 14).

Yet in focusing upon African American internationalism "from below," critics have tended to overlook a category of black internationalist engagement that has been more closely affiliated with the "diplomatic elites" referenced by Kaplan. In fact, though dozens of black U. S. citizens worked as U. S. diplomats during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her extensive overview of the "Transnational Turn in American Studies," was unable to cite any substantial work on the U. S.'s black international representatives. (3) Instead, in a footnote, she observes that "the experiences of black U.S. ... diplomats ... provide a promising avenue of research" (49). The promise of this avenue has been recently reemphasized by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, who has insightfully treated Frederick Douglass's diplomatic work in Haiti as underscoring an African American "twice-doubled consciousness" within the diasporan world (140). Similar critical promise is evinced by Jacqueline Goldsby's important explorations of the interchange between James Weldon Johnson's overlapping work as a U. S. consul and novelist in Venezuela and Nicaragua. (4) Yet an assessment of the cultural and critical legacy of African American participation in international diplomacy must involve more than a recovery of the diplomatic dossiers of famed African American writers and cultural figures. Such an assessment, if it is to offer access to black U. S. diplomats' complex range of engagements, also requires that we recover the dossiers of lesser known figures whose writings and diplomatic experiences have tended to go unremarked. (5)

Ranked among this second group, black diplomat and playwright Henry Francis Downing provides an illuminating window into the interplay among what Nwankwo and Goldsby have hinted at as the mutually reinflecting spheres of aesthetic, racial, and international representation. Though largely forgotten today, Downing worked as a U. S. consul in Luanda, Angola in 1887 and 1888, after which time he took the phrase "Late U. S. Consul" as part of his entitlements. During the 1910s, furthermore, Downing's literary work shared space with the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Carter G. Woodson in the Crisis's monthly "Selected List of Books." (6) By the 1920s, however, Downing's earlier work as a diplomat and writer was largely unknown. His consulship had faded within the U. S. State Department's institutional memory, and one Harlem Renaissance-era critic framed Downing's literary work as part of the early "stream of literary and artistic products ... from Negro writers" that had been obscured by the then-current vogue surrounding black U. S. culture and writing (Harrison 352). (7) Seeking to recover Downing from the amnesia evinced by U. S. literary and diplomatic history, this article hopes to lay the groundwork for future studies of Downing while further exploring the importance of permitting black involvement in U. S. diplomacy to assume an increased prominence in the study of African American travel and internationalism. Drawing upon Downing's complementary diplomatic and literary dossiers, this essay provides the first substantial treatment of Downing's work as a prolific London-based playwright during the 1910s. While focusing upon his play A New Coon in Town: A Farcical Comedy Made in England (1914), I argue that Downing's work in diplomacy positioned him within a system of international representation whose semiotic disjunctions and tensions contributed to his literary work's later self-conscious theorization of black racial and aesthetic representation within an international world.

More specifically, I argue that Downing weighs in upon the culturally contested site of black racial (mis)representation within the complex of geopolitical, economic, and cultural discourses that has in recent years been described as "colonial modernity," a term acknowledging the global effects of "a capitalism emanating from Euro-America" (Dirlik 20) upon "the contemporaneity and the complicity of the modern and the colonial" (19). (8) The interrelation of the colonial and the modern--epitomized by transnational circuits of capital, diaspora, aesthetics, and scientific theory--placed Africa (and people of African descent more generally) behind what one early twentieth-century commentator called a "veil of misrepresentation" (Ellis, "Psychology" 314). The early twentieth-century effects of this misrepresentative veil were pervasive. In the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois recognized that white populations fortified a white supremacist regime via a scientific and historical tradition that "unconsciously distorted" the truth about Africa (Black vii). In London, meanwhile, a black collective observed that Britain's colonially interested media engaged in "systematic ... misrepresentation" of the empire's dark populations ("Foreward" iii). Concomitantly, on a transnational artistic front, aesthetic modernism's "primitivist" streak saw modernists (among them Ezra Pound and Picasso) take Africa as a muse while modifying "their style of [realistic] representation and experiment[ing] with a non representational aesthetic" (Lemke 7). (9) Entering into dialogue with this transdiscursive deployment of Africa as a trope, occasion, and muse for disjunctive representational practices, Downing's A New Coon in Town is preoccupied with the colonial and class-based formations that participated in brokering Africa's representation within the theater of colonial modernity. In exploring these representational concerns, the play theorizes the ethical pitfalls and material benefits associated with African American race representation in a diasporan world. (10)

In a 1917 Crisis advertisement, Downing's publisher offered the following description:

 
   Mr. Downing perhaps has had a more varied career than any other 
   living Negro from the Civil War to the war between the United 
   States and Germany. He was the first colored man to represent the 
   United States at a city of white government, by appointment of 
   President Cleveland. He introduced Coleridge-Taylor to the London 
   Public. He persuaded Liberia to open its doors to foreign capital. 
   Merely to recount his activities in public life of the past fifty 
   years would take a volume. But his highest renown has been won as a 
   man of letters. ("Books") 

The description was more than puffery. In 1917, this endorsement functioned to reintroduce Downing to black Americans who had virtually forgotten he existed. Although Downing was a New York City native, extensive travel had taken him, until his 1917 return to Manhattan, a long way from home and a long way from the attention of black communities in the U. S. Likely born in 1846 or 1851, Downing was the nephew of civil fights leader George T. Downing. By the time he was thirty, Henry Downing had served in the U. S. Navy twice, and his military and personal travels had taken him throughout the Pacific as well as to West Africa. After his second discharge from the Navy, Downing married and became a prominent black New York Democrat during the 1880s. For his support, President Grover Cleveland appointed him consul to Luanda, Angola, which was at that time a Portuguese colony. (11)