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The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson's Along This Way

the morning of October 18, 1929, a ship carrying James Weldon Johnson, the novelist, poet, songwriter, journalist, civil rights activist, and diplomat known as the "Renaissance man" of the Harlem Renaissance, docked in the harbor of Yokohama, Japan. A tumultuous crowd of reporters greeted, interviewed, and photographed Johnson, a delegate to the third biennial conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, as he was gathering his luggage to go ashore. The following day, Johnsons VIP arrival made headlines in the English-language dailies in Japan, startling readers into an anxious sense that African Americans were emerging as integral members of the Pacific community. The host of the conference that Johnson was to attend in Kyoto was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). The mission of the IPR, which was founded in 1925 in Honolulu, U.S. Territory of Hawai'i, was to promote a new, American-led regionalism, embodied in the notion of a Pacific community, as well as to "study the conditions of the Pacific peoples with a view to the improvement of their mutual relations."1 The IPR was a nongovernmental international organization that envisaged a Pacific-centered perspective on the world that would pose (if implicitly) a challenge to the Eurocentric bias of the League of Nations, along with a corollary reoriented view of U.S. maneuvering in the Caribbean and Central America, as well as in Asia, as mutually constitutive of the affairs of the Pacific. A grasp of the paradigm shift in the conception of the world order reflected in the emergent conviction among IPR members that the Pacific was to be "the stage where shall meet all the races and cultures of the world"2 is crucial to understanding the route that Johnson navigates for a black internationalism in his autobiography Along This Way (1933) a route that reaches beyond U.S. borders, the Caribbean, and Europe, to embrace the Pacific in the penultimate chapter, and in the process to locate two (otherwise seemingly distinct) memories of the Pacific Rim nations of Nicaragua and Japan on a continuum, as I discuss below.