Charles Johnson's "Transmission" as an Exercise in Historiographic Metafiction and in Pan-African Agency
2018
Abstract
The paper explores one of the most ideologically-commissioned literary endeavours of African American author Charles Richard Johnson, namely his collection Soulcatcher. Johnson has repeatedly criticized the tendency of African American literature to openly invite sociological and ideological interpretations, which he sees as detrimental to its artistic merit.
The paper therefore seeks to establish whether even he abides by his own tenets when writing short fiction commissioned for ideological and documentaristic purposes. One of the short stories within the Soulcatcher collection which is very fitful for this purpose is Transmission, as it provides a third person rendition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.