Being Black in the archipelagic Americas: Racialized (im)mobilities in the autobiographies of James Weldon Johnson and Evelio Grillo

Abstract

ABSTRACT The essay discusses the autobiographies of two Black writers, James Weldon Johnson and Evelio Grillo, both of whom grew up in Florida. While Johnson experienced his hometown Jacksonville in the 1870s and 1880s as a contact zone where Black American, Black Cuban, and other ethnic groups interacted on a daily basis, Grillo spent his childhood in the 1920s in a highly segregated part of Tampa. The essay explores both texts in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century US expansionism to the Caribbean and Latin America, drawing on the field of archipelagic studies to highlight the impact of expansionism on the racial reterritorialization of Florida and on the changing mobility regimes affecting its Black and Latin populations. The autobiographies dramatize the different strategies both authors developed to negotiate these mobility regimes and their specific situations.