(S)cars: Exploring America's Automotive Self

The article opens with an autoethnographic account of its author's encounter with the American sense of space in the context of the clash of his own and American cultural norms related to car ownership and car use. The initial anecdotes, in which the negative experiences of the authors lack of knowledge of the essentials of the car culture in the US prove to be instrumental in the process of learning and adaptation, lead to a more profound, historiosophic reflection upon the cars as vehicles of ethics across American cultural history.

Fenton Johnson, Literary Entrepreneurship, and the Dynamics of Class and Family

Fenton Johnson was both poet and journalist. His Champion Magazine (1916-1917) pioneered a monthly digest format aimed at a nascent black middle-class audience interested in “Negro Achievement” from sports, theatre, and popular musical entertainment to business, politics, military service, and the professions, to art and literature. Although Johnson proved inept as a literary entrepreneur and contradictory in ideology, his first journal was richly cosmopolitan in scope and highly professional in writing, design, and layout. Johnson’s local collaborators included older African American intellectuals such as George Washington Ellis, Richard T. Greener, John Roy Lynch, and W. H. A. Moore. Besides more accurately locating Fenton Johnson in African American cultural history, this chapter sheds light on black writing and thought on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance.