Charles R. Johnson

Johnson, Charles R. (b. 1948), novelist, essayist, critic, philosopher, illustrator, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Charles Richard Johnson first manifested his creativity in the graphic arts, which he parlayed into a job as an editorial cartoonist and then into two collections of drawings—Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972)—and a drawing program on PBS (Charley's Pad, 1971) before finishing his undergraduate degree at Southern Illinois University, at Carbondale. Having found success with visual art, Johnson turned to fiction, writing six apprentice novels that remain unpublished and that he describes in Being and Race (1988) as influenced by James Baldwin and John A. Williams. In 1973, while doing graduate work in philosophy at Southern Illinois University Johnson studied with John Gardner, author of numerous innovative novels and influential critical books. Drawing on African American folktales, his interest in philosophy and Buddhism, and the insights he gained from Gardner, Johnson published Faith and the Good Thing in 1974. An intriguing amalgamation of folk wisdom and philosophical inquiry, Faith defines the broad parameters of Johnson's aesthetic system and has been compared to Invisible Man (1952), an appropriate equation given Johnson's publicly professed admiration for Ralph Ellison.

Johnson did course work at SUNY-Stony Brook for a PhD in philosophy; he also wrote screenplays for PBS, including the story of the oldest living African American cowboy, Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree (1978), and a program on Booker T. Washington (Booker, 1984). He and his family relocated to Seattle, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Washington. Other publications include the novels Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990 National Book Award); a collection of stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986); and a book of criticism, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988). He continues to write in a variety of media, completing a screenplay for the film version of Middle Passage in 1993.

Johnson's second and third novels, as well as the short stories, manifest developments in his philosophical-aesthetic system. Both Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage explore nineteenth-century America from a perspective both resolutely historical and endowed with insights from contemporary philosophy. Both books fuse traditional genres and established texts—Oxherding Tale is a slave narrative clearly drawing on Frederick Douglass's Narrative, while Middle Passage is a sea story with obvious Melvillian overtones—with a philosophical system founded primarily in phenomenology. Andrew Hawkins, the protagonist of Oxherding Tale, and Rutherford Calhoun, the narrator of Middle Passage, are African American males seeking liberation from physical and/or emotional bondage. Each highly educated, they recount self-exploration and adventures that challenge readers to expand their understanding by destroying all preconceptions they may have about the nature and definition of freedom. The philosophical experimentation Johnson carries out in these novels is bolstered by the stories in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a series of examinations and applications of a variety of philosophies, and by the theoretical chapters in his critical work, Being and Race, which outline a program for fiction writing, ostensibly for his use in critiquing other writers, that can be read as a clear statement of his own aesthetic goals and principles.

In his experimentation with concepts of factuality and chronology, Johnson shows the influence of John A. Williams, whose The Man Who Cried I Am Johnson acknowledges as an important early inspiration. His philosophical inquiries show the influence of a series of American writers, including but not limited to Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, Douglass, John Gardner, and Ellison. Furthermore, the revisions of history in his work, as well as his own statements, link him with other important contemporary writers such as Ishmael Reed.

Johnson's contributions to contemporary African American fiction include a heightened awareness of the links between philosophy and fiction; a further development of the postmodernist sensibilities of history and chronology; and the creation of one of the most compelling and interesting contemporary philosophical-fictional tropes, the Allmuseri, his utterly unique tribe of African sorcerers who appear in several stories and in his second and third novels. Through them Johnson most effectively articulates his innovative approaches to time, history, language, and truth as constructs that bear examination; they represent the full embodiment of his ideology and challenge readers' belief systems, providing an opportunity for the reader to experience the intellectual growth the narrators do through contact with the tribesmen.

Johnson's most recent novel, Dreamer: A Novel (1998), combines philosophy and history in a depiction of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a King look-alike. This construction allows Johnson to explore the various beliefs that shaped King's nonviolence philosophy and to speculate about what would have happened to the movement he began if the King double had been shot in Memphis instead of the real King. Johnson's other work in the 1990s included an introduction he wrote to What Is Man?/Mark Twain (1996) and Black Men Speaking, which he edited with fellow writer John McCluskey, Jr., in 1997.

Gaining recognition for his radical and significant innovations, Johnson stands as a major contemporary writer, offering a fascinating outlook on African American history, fiction, and philosophy that will greatly influence future generations.

Bibliography

• Charles Richard Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970, 1988.
• William Gleason, “The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Winter 1991): 706–728.
• Jennifer Hayward, “Something to Serve: Constructs of the Feminine in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Winter 1991): 689–703.
• Jonathan Little, “Charles Johnson's Revolutionary Oxherding Tale,” Studies in American Fiction 19 (Autumn 1991): 141–152.
• Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery,” African American Review 26 (Sept. 1992): 373–394.
• Jonathan Little, “An Interview with Charles Johnson,” Contemporary Literature 34 (Summer 1993): 159–181.
• Rudolf P. Byrd, ed., I Call Myself An Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson, 1999

William R. Nash

African American educator and sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson (1893-1956) gave outstanding leadership to Fisk University and conducted important research on human relations and the problems of blacks in America.

Charles Spurgeon Johnson was born on July 24, 1893, in Bristol, Va., the son of a Baptist minister. His father's books on philosophy, history, and religion were sources of inspiration. He completed college at Virginia Union University in 1917, having been a student leader. Johnson received his bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Chicago and pursued graduate work in sociology there. He married Marie Burgette in 1920; they had four children.

Johnson's distinguished and extraordinarily productive career as a sociologist began when he organized the Department of Research and Investigation of the Chicago Urban League in 1917. He was a member of the Committee on Race Relations, which reported on the Chicago race riot of 1919 in The Negro in Chicago (1922). In 1920, as director of research and investigation for the New York Urban League, he established the magazine Opportunity, a leading periodical during the "Harlem Renaissance" that inspired many young blacks. In 1928, he went to head Fisk University's sociology department; with unmatched vision, he made it internationally famous. He was president of Fisk from 1947 to 1956.

Meanwhile, Johnson published books, articles, book reviews, pamphlets, and chapters in books. His research and writing centered on African American life and culture and on race relations. Among his most outstanding books are The Negro in American Civilization (1930), The Shadow of the Plantation (1934), A Preface to Racial Understanding (1936), The Negro College Graduate (1938), Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), Patterns of Segregation (1943), To Stem This Tide (1943), and Into the Mainstream (1947).

Johnson's profound grasp of sociology was recognized in his numerous positions: as member, International Commission of the League of Nations; secretary, Commission on Negro Housing of President Herbert Hoover's Conference on Homebuilding and Home Ownership; member, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Committee on Farm Tenancy; member, White House Conference on Children in a Democracy; president, Southern Sociological Society; one of 10 American delegates to the first session of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; one of 20 educators sent to Japan in 1946 to reorganize the educational system; and member, Conference on Science, Religion, and Philosophy. From 1944 to 1950 Johnson was director of race relations of the American Missionary Association of the Congregational and Christian Churches. In 1948 he served as a delegate to the World Council of Churches Assembly. He also lectured widely in America and Scandinavia.

In addition to the Harmon Award (1930) and the University of Chicago Alumni Citation for distinguished public service (1945), Johnson received honorary degrees from Virginia Union, Howard, Columbia, Harvard, and Lincoln universities, from Central State College, and from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He died on October 27, 1956.

Further Reading

A short autobiography of Johnson is in Louis Finkelstein, ed., American Spiritual Autobiographies: Fifteen Self-Portraits (1948). An account of him is in W.S. Robinson, Historical Negro Biographies (1968). Edwin R. Embree, 13 against the Odds (1944), contains a chapter on Johnson.

Additional Sources

Robbins, Richard, Sidelines activist: Charles S. Johnson and the struggle for civil rights, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

novelist; essayist; cartoonist

Personal Information

Full name, Charles Richard Johnson; born April 23, 1948, in Evanston, IL; son of Benjamin Lee and Ruby Elizabeth (Jackson) Johnson; married Joan New (a teacher), June, 1970; children: Malik, Elizabeth. Education Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, B.A., 1971, M.A., 1973; State University of New York at Stony Brook, doctoral study in philosophy, 1973-76.
Religion: Buddhist.

Career

Chicago Tribune, cartoonist and reporter, 1969-70; St. Louis Proud, member of art staff, 1971-72; University of Washington, assistant professor, 1976-79, associate professor, 1979-82, professor of English, 1982--, endowed chair of humanities, 1991--. Seattle Review, fiction editor, 1978--; Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Short Fiction, director, 1979-81, member of board of directors, 1983--.

Life's Work

When Charles Johnson won the 1990 National Book Award in fiction for his third novel, Middle Passage, he became the first black man to win the award since Ralph Ellison won in 1953 for Invisible Man. It is worth noting too that literary critic Elizabeth A. Schultz equated Johnson with Ellison in her 1978 essay "he Heirs of Ralph Ellison," and that Johnson himself has written with admiration of the "magnificent feast of fictional styles" found in Invisible Man.

Aside from Ellison, Johnson cites Jean Toomer and Richard Wright as writers he admires; moreover, his 11-year association with novelist John Gardner has helped him develop his unique brand of philosophical fiction. In his 1988 article "Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet" Johnson praised Toomer as a writer "whose lovely and language-rich Cane ushered in the Harlem Renaissance and advanced the American short story as a form." He noted that Toomer's image of the "blue man" suggested "infinity and the transcendence of dualism," an important concept in Johnson's personal development from a member of the black arts movement of the 1960s to a philosophical novelist. While Johnson's first publication, a cartoon collection titled Black Humor, was a direct result of his exposure to playwright and social theorist Amiri Baraka and the black arts movement, Johnson came to recognize that "the built-in danger of this cultural nationalism is the very tendency toward provincialism, separatism and essentialist modes of thought that characterize the Anglophilia it opposes."

Before he became a fiction writer Johnson established himself as a political cartoonist, publishing book-length works and contributing to a variety of newspapers and magazines. In 1970 he produced and co-hosted a how-to-draw television series on the Public Broadcasting Service called Charlie's Pad. At the same time, Johnson was heavily involved in cultural nationalism, organizing groups in the newly formed discipline of black studies. Then, he says, "I began to see that the intellectual questions I wanted to pursue, some of them were foreclosed on by some of the principal spokesmen of the black arts movement." In the writings of Toomer, Wright, and Ellison Johnson found a basis for the type of philosophical fiction he wanted to write. Wright, though recognized as a leading writer of racial protest, also wrote works that Johnson felt were "compatible with the most interesting ideas in continental philosophy during the thirties and forties." Similarly, Johnson found Ellison's Invisible Man "to be, at bottom, about the ambiguities of perception and interpretation in the racial world."

Johnson's development as a first-class novelist and writer began with his association with John Gardner. Feeling out of step with his black arts contemporaries, Johnson wrote in American Visions, "I tried to maintain that most insecure of positions demanded by philosophy: namely, a perpetual openness to thoughts and feelings wherever I found them. And a tremendous source of help for this was my 11-year association with John Gardner." Johnson studied under Gardner at Southern Illinois University as a graduate student, earning a master's degree in philosophy.

Johnson had written six apprentice novels before penning Faith and the Good Thing, published in 1974. As described by Arthur P. Davis in his survey Novels of the New Black Renaissance, it is "a fascinating melange of classic philosophy, scholasticism, occult writings, folklore (including Southern superstition and Negro tall tales), surrealistic dreams, flashbacks, and down-to-earth realism.... Taking Faith from her Deep Southern home to Chicago and back to her native region, the author carries the reader along with a brilliant tour de force of fantasy and realism." Davis found Johnson's refinement and folk knowledge an unusual mixture and called the novel "a strange book, a provocative book, an eminently readable book." It is the "overall mythic design" of Faith and the Good Thing that initially led literary critic Schultz to draw her comparison to Ellison's Invisible Man.

Eight years passed before Johnson's second novel, Oxherding Tale, was published. According to the author, the manuscript "went through 25 publishers before Indiana University Press took the great risk of releasing it." Like his award-winning third novel, Middle Passage, his second novel is a slave narrative. Johnson admits that Oxherding Tale is more complex than Middle Passage. He describes it as "a modern, comic, philosophical slave narrative--a kind of dramatization of the famous `Ten Oxherding Pictures' of Zen artist Kakuan-Shien." Soon after the publication of Oxherding Tale Johnson began research for Middle Passage. "I went back and looked at every sea story from Apollonius of Rhodes to Homer--all the way through Melville, Conrad, London, the Sinbad stories, slave narratives that took place on boats--about the middle passage."

Like his previous novels, Middle Passage combines the adventures of a roguish main character with philosophical concerns about race, culture, and individual identity. Characteristic of much of Johnson's fiction, humor and satire are also found in abundance. As Linnea Lannon described Middle Passage in the Detroit Free Press, "It is at once witty and wily, a novel laced with references to great adventures of another age (Moby Dick and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") but not weighed down by them, a deeply philosophical book that never leaves the reader mired in symbolism." Johnson himself described Middle Passage as "a philosophical sea adventure, a genre-crossing novel, which is itself a kind of genre." In accepting the National Book Award for Middle Passage, he predicted that black fiction would become one of "increasing intellectual and artistic generosity, one that enables us as a people, as a culture, to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration."

Awards

Named journalism alumnus of the year, Southern Illinois University, 1981; Governor's Award for literature, State of Washington, 1983, for Oxherding Tale; Callalo Creative Writing Award, 1983, for short story "Popper's Disease"; outstanding writer citation from Pushcart Prize, 1984, for short story "China"; Writer's Guild award for best children's show, 1986, for "Booker"; PEN/Faulkner Award nomination, 1987, for The Sorcerer's Apprentice; National Book Award in fiction, 1990, for Middle Passage.

Works

Writings

• Black Humor (cartoon collection), Johnson, 1970.
• Half-Past Nation Time (cartoon collection), Aware, 1972.
• Faith and the Good Thing (novel), Viking, 1974.
• Oxherding Tale (novel), Indiana University Press, 1982.
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice (short stories), Atheneum, 1986.
• Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (essays), Indiana University Press, 1988.
• Middle Passage (novel), Atheneum, 1990.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Authors, Volume 116, Gale, 1986.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 51, 1989.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33, Gale, 1984.

• American Visions, June 1988.
• Boston Globe, January 28, 1991.
• Callaloo, October 1978.
• Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 1991.
• CLA Journal, June 1978; December 1978.
• Contemporary Literature, Autumn 1978.
• Detroit Free Press, December 9, 1990.
• Detroit News, January 17, 1991.
• New York Times Book Review, July 1, 1990.
• People, January 14, 1991.
• Village Voice, July 19, 1983.

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Charles R. Johnson
Occupation	writer
Nationality	American

Charles R. Johnson (born 1948 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American scholar and author of novels, short stories, and essays. Johnson, an African-American, has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Middle Passage and Dreamer.

Contents 1 Life 2 Controversy 3 Beliefs 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 External links

Life

Johnson first came to prominence in the 1960s as a political cartoonist, at which time he was also involved in radical politics. In 1970, he published a collection of cartoons, and this led to a television series about cartooning on PBS. Johnson's first novel, Faith and the Good Thing was published in 1974. In 1990, he was awarded the National Book Award for Middle Passage.

Johnson received his B.S. and M.A. from Southern Illinois University in 1971 and 1973, respectively; he got his Ph.D. in philosophy from SUNY-Stony Brook in 1988.

In 1977, Johnson became a Buddhist.^[1]

Johnson's mentor, early in his writing career, was the writer John Gardner. In an interview^[1], Johnson wrote, of Gardner:

"Gardner, as I’ve said often, was the hardest-working writer I’ve ever known in my life. “Writing is the only religion I have,” he once said, and this was true. He was prolific, innovative, learned (a scholar of medieval literature ), radically independent, a translator who said he knew twelve languages, a poet, librettist, novelist, short story writer, a composer of scripts for radio and films, a critic and literary scholar, player of the French horn: a true cornucopia of creativity. He could write for 72-hour stretches without sleep. But, no, he was not a gifted storyteller, as he would have admitted. His most enduring novel is Grendel, which is, of course, derived from the story we receive from the Beowulf poet. But he was an American philosophical writer, like Saul Bellow."^[1]

Recently retired,^[2], Johnson was the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington and is a MacArthur Fellow. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2003 he published Turning the Wheel, a collections of essays about his experiences as an African-American Buddhist.

Controversy

In the updated 1995 introduction to his novel Oxherding Tale, Johnson engendered a political firestorm when he seemed to criticize Alice Walker's The Color Purple for its negative portrayal of African-American males. Quoth Johnson: "I leave it to readers to decide which book pushes harder at the boundaries of convention, and inhabits most confidently the space where fiction and philosophy meet." Such candor and criticism came as a shock to some in academia, who felt Johnson violated an unspoken taboo against criticizing another writer of color.

In a 2007 interview, Johnson described the controversy this way:

"I’ve met Alice Walker. We met in the ‘70s at a New York book party for her novel Meridian. While I have artistic and intellectual problems with The Color Purple, I think the author is addressing a legitimate problem: namely, the pain many black women have felt, historically, from not being able to rely on their men being men (reliable, supportive, there to help raise the babies they make) in a society and culture that since the 17th century has tried to emasculate black men. (See my discussion of her novel in Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970). Walker has never said anything to me about that statement in the preface to Oxherding Tale. But there are, I know, some black (and white) feminists who probably hate me, but that’s their problem, not mine. (As a buddy of mine always says, “Hate kills its host first.”)"^[1]

Beliefs

In an online interview, Johnson described his beliefs and American Buddhism this way:

"Buddhism was really unknown to the general public in the West before World War II. After the 40s, when American black and white soldiers came back with Buddhist wives, and the first teachers (Suzuki was huge back then) came to these shores, Zen Buddhism flourished among artists and so-called hip people, like the Beats. But they misunderstood a very great deal...The steps on the Eightfold Path are nothing like the Ten Commandments. Buddhists never command anything. We have no interest in imposing our will on others. Like the precepts, the Eightfold Path offers a blueprint for ethical living that leads to awakening or nirvana (The word suggests to blow out the illusory sense of self, nir meaning “out” and vana “to blow”.) The Buddha made it clear that we are not to accept the Four Noble Truths or Eightfold Path on his (or any) authority. Rather, we are to confirm (or deny) their truth in the depths of our own experience, and proceed from there, adapting the Eightfold Path to our own experiences, time and place. No two people arrive at awakening on the same path."^[1]

In that same interview, Johnson said this of race and racism in America, and white views of blacks:

"During the age of slavery, then the era of Jim Crow segregation, when whites separated themselves from blacks, they needed a black individual to tell them what black people thought, desired, needed, etc. (How else were they going to find out?) Often that person was the black community’s minister; later writers served that purpose, from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin. I personally think in the post-Civil Rights period a black person is wasting his (or her) time, the preciously few years of their lives, by devoting their energy---as a “spokesman”--- to explaining so-called “black” things to white people. Whites can---and should---do their own homework. Read from the vast library of books on black American history and culture. Take a course, for God’s sake, on some aspect of black history. Then black individuals can be free to pursue the whole, vast universe that awaits their discovery (as it does for any white person), leaving behind emotionally draining racial discussions to investigate astrophysics, DNA sequencing, cosmology, Sanskrit, the Buddhadharma, mathematics, nano-technology, everything in this universe that remains such a mystery to us."^[1]

Johnson described his working methods this way:

"I’ve kept writer’s workbooks since around 1972. They fill up a whole shelf in my study. Almost every day I’m recording a thought or image on the pages of my current workbook for future use. The workbooks, as I see them, are a memory aide. When I revise a story or novel, I go through all those workbooks to see if there is an image or idea that I might have had, say, thirty years ago that is useful for an in-progress fiction or essay. It takes me about eight hours (at least) to tramp through all those workbooks when I’m in the final stages of revision. I do the same with old drafts of novels. For one of the six novels I wrote between 1970 and 1972, I did research to describe a character using heroin. When writing Dreamer, I dug up those old pages and used the details for my character Chaym Smith, the fictitious double for Martin Luther King Jr.^[1]

He also stated this about the necessity of rewriting:

"Writing itself is the best teacher of writing, so a young or old writer must learn that, if necessary, his ratio of throwaway to keep pages might turn out to be 20 to 1. (90% of good writing, as the saying goes, is rewriting."^[1]

Bibliography

• Faith and the Good Thing (1974, ISBN 0-7432-1254-1)
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (1982, ISBN 0-452-27237-8)
• Oxherding Tale (1982, ISBN 0-253-16607-1)
• Being and Race (1988, ISBN 0-253-31165-9)
• Middle Passage (1990, ISBN 0-684-85588-7)
• Dreamer: A Novel (1998, ISBN 0-684-85443-0)
• Turning the Wheel (2003, ISBN 0-7432-4324-2)

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} In depth interview with Charles Johnson, Monsters and Critics, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
2. ^ Bartley, Nancy (August 24, 2009), "Retired UW professor still enlivening the literary world", The Seattle Times, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2009722345_charlesjohnson24m.html 

• Nishikawa, Kinohi. "Charles R. Johnson." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 865-67.

External links

• http://www.oxherdingtale.com/
• http://depts.washington.edu/engl/people/profile.php?id=32
• Shambhala Sun Interview
• Johnson, Charles. "Whole Sight: The Intersection of Culture, Faith, and the Imagination." Audio, video, and transcript of lecture. February 1, 2007.

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