Artistic Ambassadors

During the first generation of black participation in U.S. diplomacy in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a vibrant community of African American writers andcultural figures worked as U.S. representatives abroad. Through the literary and diplomatic dossiersof figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Archibald and Angelina Grimk W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, and Richard Wright, Brian Roberts shows how the intersection of blackaesthetic trends and U.S. political culture both Americanized and internationalized the trope of theNew Negro. This decades-long relationship began during the days of Reconstruction, and itflourished as U.S. presidents courted and rewarded their black voting constituencies by appointingblack men as consuls and ministers to such locales as Liberia, Haiti, Madagascar, and Venezuela. These appointments changed the complexion of U.S. interactions with nations and colonies of color,in turn, state-sponsored black travel gave rise to literary works that imported internationalrepresentation into New Negro discourse on aesthetics, race, and African Americanculture.Beyond offering a narrative of the formative dialogue between blacktransnationalism and U.S. international diplomacy, Artistic Ambassadors alsoilluminates a broader literary culture that reached both black and white America as well as theblack diaspora and the wider world of people of color. In light of the U.S. appointments of itsfirst two black secretaries of state and the election of its first black president, this complexrepresentational legacy has continued relevance to our understanding of current Americaninternationalism.