Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remarked almost forty years ago that “[l]anguage carries culture, and culture

carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to

perceive ourselves and our place in the world [...] at their entire relationship to nature and to

other beings” (1986 [1992], 16). Although his comment originated in post-colonial literary

thought within an East African linguistic context, these words retain increasing significance

today and are more broadly applicable to any sociologically-informed literary discussions in the

American classroom. To this end, the literature of the Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem (cf. Chesnutt

1931, inter alia) offers a window into the complex sociocultural, historical, and political context

of the United States in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had previously

been defined as the Black Nadir. Accordingly, this paper presents the results of a four-week

instructional unit, which took place in a tenth-grade English classroom at a semi-suburban high

school in north-central New Jersey, that required students to read and engage critically with

James Weldon Johnson's (1912 [1927]) The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Most

importantly, the present study advocates a departure from ‘interpretation by free association’

(Reader Response Theory) and, instead, proposes a more nuanced understanding of the United

States at the fin de siècle through student-driven questioning of and conversations about the

sociological, cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary dimensions of such works.