Artistic Ambassadors

This well-written and thoroughly researched study sits at the intersection of works on the cultures of U.S. imperialism and works on black transnationalism. It is distinctive in identifying the ways blackness and empire, as racial and political formations, have been intertwined with rather than antagonistic to each other, race with empire rather than against it. Artistic Ambassadors offers an alternative trajectory to civil rights in African American political culture, one that sits both within the state and without domestic space, contextualizing the later rise of Ralph Bunche but also certain elements of Barack Obama's presidency. Artistic Ambassadors also provides a crucial missing link in understanding why certain forms of self-determined, New Negro, black masculine identity rested on the notion of racial representativeness, as Roberts tracks the journey from 'Negro representative' abroad to 'representative Negro' at home. --Michelle Stephens, author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 Brian Roberts's Artistic Ambassadors is an essential book for understanding transnationalism in African American modernity. Roberts shows us how the diverse international work of African American intellectuals--from consular work for the State Department to anti-imperialist Pan-Africanism--informed African American culture and politics long before our current debates about globalization. --John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California, author of Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II What makes Roberts's book so compelling in the context of studies of black transnationalism is his focus on figures... who were caught in the intricate nexus of acquiescence to the state and, at times, principled opposition to it.... The somewhat anomalous position of these diplomats makes them prime sources for scrutinizing how far the bonds--and the breaks--of the international may take us.... Reflecting upon the rich histories of those who shuttled between these poles of negotiation may be our best hope of articulating provisional solutions and avoiding the pitfalls of the past. --Kate Baldwin "American Literary History " Brian Roberts takes the adventurous reader on a dazzling, intellectually challenging roller coaster ride. He juxtaposes the literary and diplomatic endeavors of a variety of African American internationalists (Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Ida Gibbs Hunt among them) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and analyzes both their evolving creative output and their governmental missions. Roberts skillfully maneuvers us through the global shoals those men and women navigated and astounds us with their earlier, and his own present-day, daring. Artistic Ambassadors provides both serious mental exercise and an exciting interdisciplinary romp, seen from new perspectives and with new eyes, through African American history and literature. --Adele Logan Alexander, author of Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin A revelatory exploration of the chasms and bridges between black internationalism and U.S. diplomacy in the twentieth century. With remarkable archival ingenuity, Brian Roberts explores the resonances between literary representation and political representation, above all in a set of powerful readings of the ways some of the major works of the African American literary tradition--by James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Angelina Weld Grimke, among others--were written in the shadow of diplomacy, even when they might at first seem to be merely 'domestic.' Artistic Ambassadors forces us to reconsider the literary writing of overlooked black diplomats (George Washington Ellis, Henry Francis Downing) as well as to recontextualize the work of 'ersatz' diplomats such as Ida Gibbs Hunt and Richard Wright wh

Brian Russell Roberts is Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, USA.