ABSTRACT
Middle Passage brought Charles Johnson, African-American artist, fiction writer, and philosopher, wide recognition. After working as a journalist, publishing satirical cartoons lambasting race relations in America, and earning a Ph.D. in philosophy, Johnson has focused on creative writing and teaching. In Middle Passage, Johnson shows slaves and free African Americans as fully developed characters having many sides—telling stories, writing, thinking, feel-ing—all with the complications and paradoxes every person shares. Middle Passage presents the aesthetic world's limits as well as its anti-rational paradoxes. The novel presents the aesthetic experience's moral ambiguities and ethical conundrums—the "what ifs" and possibilities that poetry evokes. In the aesthetic world it is possible to imagine different ways of being and even to imagine the loss of being. Exploring Buddhism in narratives is one way of understanding and, in the age of ideological criticism, of recovering the aesthetic experience's dynamism, the complex interplay of voluntary involvement, cognitive selection, and affective response.
