SOURCE: Hardack, Richard. “Black Skin, White Tissues: Local Color and Universal Solvents in the Novels of Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 22, no. 4 (1999): 1028-53.

In the following essay, Hardack discusses Johnson's application of transcendental thought to issues of race, identity, and history in his novels such as Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage, and Faith and the Good Thing.

1. Black Skin

In his postmodern novels Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage—and in passing, Faith and the Good Thing, Johnsonian pun intended—Charles Johnson implies that African Americans lacked access to a Jacksonian self during the American Renaissance. As such they were dispossessed of a transcendentalism rightly theirs—what Johnson at times characterizes as a pre-Western, unmediated relationship with Being or Nature.¹ Having no property-based self-identity to transcend, African-American men and women were denied access to a putative pre-Western unity of being, access white male transcendentalists pursuing Jacksonian selves can only problematically feign. Johnson...