Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

by James Weldon Johnson

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

As an experimental work of Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance alike, the novel plays with several different genres. It is ostensibly an autobiography but, in reality, is a novel. While the narrator and events of the novel are fictional, Johnson first published it anonymously so that readers encountered it as if it were a true autobiography of a Black American who had chosen to pass as white. In this way, the novel positions itself as a successor to earlier autobiographical writings by Black people, including Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs. Whereas these earlier autobiographies focused on their authors' enslavement and struggle for freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was an "autobiography" for a new age in the struggle for Black people's civil rights. It tells the story of a man who, though he was born after the official end of slavery, still struggles to find a place for himself in a highly segregated society.