Book Arts
Over many years of reading, rereading, and researching The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson (first published anonymously in 1912 and reissued under Johnson’s name in 1927) , I moved from bookmarking significant passages in the text to transforming a copy of the entire book into a book arts object.
Johnson’s novel, structured as a fictional autobiography, follows an unnamed and musically gifted narrator fluent in both European classical traditions and African American ragtime. Set in post-Reconstruction America, the story centers on the fluidity of racial identity. The narrator, raised believing himself to be white, learns abruptly that he is socially defined as Black. Although he eventually embraces his Blackness through artistic achievement in ragtime performance, he ultimately chooses to “pass” as white, relinquishing both his public racial identity and his artistic vocation.
My project translates this narrative of racial passing into a visual language structured through color, tone, shape, and rhythm. Each bookmark marks not only a passage in the novel but also a formal response to it. The culminating “key” bookmark—composed of layered elements drawn from all the preceding bookmarks—synthesizes the novel’s arc. Its stratified structure reflects the layered construction of racial identity that Johnson’s text explores.
The upper layers of the “key” consist of lighter-toned, regular forms that evoke measured musical “beats” associated with European classical composition. Beneath them emerge darker-toned, irregular, syncopated forms, visually referencing ragtime. This interplay of tonal and formal contrast stages, in material terms, the cultural and aesthetic tensions shaping the narrator’s divided inheritance. In the final layers—corresponding to the closing chapters in which he irrevocably crosses the color line—the composition returns to lighter tones, visually enacting the erasure embedded in racial passing.
When the book is turned over and its back cover faces outward, the accumulated spectrum of tonal variation—suggestive of phenotypic difference, mixed-race subjectivity, and suppressed histories—disappears beneath a single, all-encompassing white bookmark. This formal covering functions as a metaphor for white supremacy as a system that conceals and neutralizes racial complexity. The narrator’s mixed heritage and unrealized artistic contribution are rendered invisible.
Yet the white bookmark may also be understood as a generative surface: a blank field upon which alternative narratives of mixed-race identity might be inscribed. In this sense, the altered book becomes both critique and beginning—one text giving rise to another.