Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0253219191
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253219190
- Pub. Date:
- 02/01/2007
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253219191
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253219190
- Pub. Date:
- 02/01/2007
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253219190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2007 |
| Series: | Blacks in the Diaspora |
| Edition description: | Annotated |
| Pages: | 294 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Word, Image, and the New Negro
Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance
By Anne Elizabeth Carroll
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Anne Elizabeth CarrollAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34583-7
CHAPTER 1
Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in The Crisis
The Crisis magazine, as the monthly publication of the NAACP; the product of editor, intellectual, and political and social leader W. E. B. Du Bois; and a supporter of the development of literature and arts by African Americans, particularly in the 1920s, was one of the most important periodicals of the Harlem Renaissance. But its work in offering information about African Americans actually began in the decade leading up to the movement. Starting with its first issue in November 1910, The Crisis was a source of thousands of texts that depicted African Americans and their experiences. Many of these texts are positive in nature and draw attention to African Americans' accomplishments. But others focus on the mistreatment of African Americans, demonstrating the extent and consequences of American racism. Both protest and affirmative texts in the magazine include visual elements: individual pages of The Crisis are composite texts that pair written copy and headlines with photographs, drawings, maps, and graphs. These combinations make its protests against the treatment of African Americans and affirmations of their achievements and potential particularly convincing and compelling.
Also significant to the impact of The Crisis, though, is the juxtaposition of these protests and affirmations. Many features that demonstrate the accomplishments of individual African Americans are positioned alongside those that record and decry American racism. The resulting pages have an incongruence that is characteristic of montages or collages, and art and film theory about these forms suggests that the discord among their elements heightens their effect. These striking combinations of diverse texts and images are particularly common in the magazine's first decade; the disjunctions in The Crisis of those years make its critique of American racism and its affirmation of African Americans' achievements especially compelling. Returning our attention to The Crisis as it was originally published during those years and analyzing the relations among its various texts deepens our appreciation of the importance of its multi-media format and its layout. Studying the mix of texts on its pages, furthermore, makes it clear that, when we turn our attention to the collaborative illustrated volumes published during the next decade, we will similarly need to pay attention to the relations among the many kinds of texts on their pages.
* * *
The combinations of different kinds of texts in the pages of The Crisis, however, have not been reflected in scholarship on the magazine. While scholars have paid a fair amount of attention to The Crisis in the 1920s, particularly its role in drawing attention to the arts in the 1920s and in promoting the Harlem Renaissance, analyses of the magazine in the 1910s have been more limited. Such studies are aided by a number of anthologies of the essays Du Bois published in The Crisis, such as the relevant volumes of The Complete Published Works of W.E.B. Du Bois, edited by Herbert Aptheker. Because original copies of the magazine are difficult to come by, such collections and analyses of its contents are extremely helpful to scholars. But they fail to reflect the combinations of texts in The Crisis in two ways. First, many of the studies and reprints of protests from The Crisis do not set them in the context of the magazine's extensive attention to the achievements of African Americans. Second, much of the scholarship on The Crisis focuses almost exclusively on its written texts. This work includes few, if any, illustrations from the magazine, and it rarely refers to the numerous portraits, news photographs, and drawings that were included in each issue. Most scholarship on the magazine, therefore, has failed to address the fact that The Crisis included both protest and affirmation and both written and visual texts.
The importance of each of these kinds of texts to The Crisis is made clear, first, by a consideration of the goals originally articulated for the magazine by Du Bois and the mission of the NAACR Du Bois had wanted to edit a monthly magazine that would be primarily aimed at African American readers for some time before he launched The Crisis. He had surveyed the black press in 1905 and had found no publication that filled what he called a "great need" for a "high class journal to circulate among the intelligent Negroes." Writing to a potential financial supporter, he made the purpose of his ideal magazine clear: it would tell African Americans "of the deeds of themselves 8c their neighbors, interpret the news of the world to them 8c inspire them toward definite ideals." He acknowledged that there were "many small weekly papers 8c one or two monthlies" published for African American readers but argued that none accomplished these goals. Du Bois was confident that he could do better. With "a knowledge of modern publishing methods" and "a knowledge of the Negro people," he was sure that an editor could publish a long-lived and widely circulated magazine ("A Proposed Negro Journal" 79).
Though this appeal for money was unsuccessful, Du Bois launched two magazines within the next few years. Both, however, were short lived and suffered from a lack of funds and readers: the Moon Illustrated Weekly lasted from 1905 to 1906, and Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line lasted from 1907 to 1910. Du Bois got a third chance when the NAACP hired him as director of research and publicity in 1910. Originally, the organization did not plan to publish a monthly magazine, and there was, in fact, significant resistance to the idea, particularly because of the potential expense involved. The board of directors finally agreed to let Du Bois start The Crisis, with the qualification that it would provide only a fifty-dollar monthly line of credit toward its cost. Though disagreements between Du Bois and the board were ongoing, particularly over the magazine's editorials, his position with the NAACP gave Du Bois a salary, office space, and a large number of potential readers among the organization's members.
The disagreements between Du Bois and the board notwithstanding, The Crisis generally does reflect the goals of the NAACP. The organization was founded in part as a response to the absence of protests of the murder of African Americans in Springfield, Illinois, in August 1908. Riots had resulted in two lynchings, six fatal shootings, and more than eighty injuries (Lewis, Du Bois I: 388). William English Walling, a socialist reformer, lamented after the violence that there was no large organization that would stand up against such treatment of African Americans. With the encouragement of Mary White Ovington and a few other white reformers, Walling started the group that would become the NAACP to serve that purpose (Lewis, Du Bois I: 387-89). They carefully included both blacks and whites in planning sessions and on the board of directors; the organization, then, and the readership for its magazine were interracial.
The organization's aim of protesting American racism is reflected in its magazine, beginning with a number of editorials that define the mission of both. The purpose of the NAACP, according to one, was to supply and nurture "earnest, active opposition" to the increase of racism by "doing away with the excuses for prejudice ... showing the unreasonableness of prejudice ... [and] exposing the evils of race prejudice" ("Editorial: N.A.A.C.P." 16). The role of The Crisis in that effort, another editorial made clear, would be to "set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested to-day toward colored people" ("Editorial: The Crisis" 10). That editorial also explained, though, that the magazine would include more than protest. It also would "record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of interracial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American"; in addition, it would include reviews of "books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem"; short articles; and an editorial page that would "stand for the rights of men" ("Editorial: The Crisis" 10). It would serve, then, as a forum for recording and discussing events and ideas about race and the treatment of African Americans. Not mentioned but very much a part of every issue were texts that recorded African Americans' accomplishments. In fact, it is perhaps the affirmative texts in The Crisis that were most successful at undermining excuses for prejudice and showing its unreasonableness; they challenged racism by establishing and defining the character traits of African Americans, refuting the stereotypes that underlay assumptions about African Americans. Both protests and affirmations, then, were part of the magazine's response to the depiction and treatment of African Americans.
Illustrations, too, were common in the pages of The Crisis. Pictures were highly valued contributions to the magazine, and they were actively sought. An advertisement for The Crisis in its fourth issue noted, "It is especially desired to increase the number and quality of the illustrations so as to make the magazine a pictorial history of the Color Line." Starting in September 1913, the importance of "Pictures" was indicated by the fact that they were listed as the first item in the table of contents for most issues through 1921. Years later, Du Bois attributed the success of The Crisis in part to its inclusion of affirmative visual images. "Pictures of colored people were an innovation," he wrote in 1951. Those that showed African Americans in a positive light were particularly crucial, Du Bois explained, because "at that time it was the rule of most white papers never to publish a picture of a colored person except as a criminal." The photographs in The Crisis, then, were important antidotes to images of African Americans published in the mainstream press.
In his reflections on the success of the magazine, Du Bois also mentioned the news the magazine carried and the "blazing editorials which continually got us into hot water with friends and foes" ("Editing The Crisis" xxix). Du Bois's assessment suggests that its protests and affirmations, both in written and visual form, were important to the impact of the magazine. Its inclusion of so many kinds of texts also sets it in line with emerging trends in newspaper and magazine publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, when Du Bois described the "Negro journal" he wanted to establish in 1905, he explained that the publication would be "on the order of Harper's Weekly or Colliers [sic]" ("A Proposed Negro Journal" 78). Both included news, editorials, creative literature, and discussions of politics; in addition, both were heavily illustrated, with comics, political cartoons, portraits, maps, and photographs accompanying the written texts. Du Bois's proposed journal, he wrote, would include a similar mix of texts: it would be a "literary digest of fact and opinion," would include news about black people in the United States and elsewhere, and would feature " [illustrations attempting to portray Negro life on its beautiful and interesting side" ("A Proposed Negro Journal" 78). The difference between established magazines and Du Bois's would be their attention — or lack thereof — to African Americans and to the color line. Far too many "mainstream" periodicals of the time were racist and derogatory in their depictions of African Americans, as was shown in numerous examples in The Crisis. A few white periodicals devoted occasional attention to the achievements of African Americans and protested lynchings and acts of racism and violence against African Americans, but such coverage was the exception rather than the norm. The mix of visual and written texts in The Crisis, then, can also be found in other periodicals of the early twentieth century, but Du Bois filled a gap in their coverage when he used this mixed-media format to depict the experiences of African Americans.
The coverage in The Crisis of racism and violence against African Americans also parallels the rise of investigative journalism — also known as muckraking — in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Muckrakings exposés of wrongdoing in various aspects of American society, such as politics, labor relations, and health care, were important elements in the two magazines Du Bois mentioned: Harper's Weekly and Collier's both featured muckraking journalism, such as investigations of the corrupt Tammany Hall politicians in the 1870s (Aucoin 211; Rounds 221). It would have made sense for muckrakers to focus their attention on the injustices of American racism, but most did not. In fact, at least one of the leading publishers of investigative journalism, McClure's, was quite open to racist contributions and quite closed to responses from African Americans. In 1907, after the magazine had run a particularly offensive essay by Thomas Nelson Page, Du Bois proposed that he write a piece that would respond to this kind of "anti-Negro propaganda." The editors of McClure's first denied him the opportunity, saying that they did not want "to open our pages to a controversy." After Du Bois insisted that the magazine needed to show "some elementary justice toward us," the publisher invited him to submit an article, but it was later rejected. Du Bois must have been particularly frustrated by the fact that even this magazine, devoted as it was to revealing other kinds of social iniquities, refused to challenge public opinion about African Americans or even allow African Americans to respond to negative arguments about themselves.
In contrast, Du Bois would have found precedents for the protest elements of The Crisis in other black periodicals. The protests in The Crisis fit, for example, in the tradition of abolitionist journalism established in nineteenth-century newspapers like The North Star, The Liberator, and Freedom's Journal (Lewis, Du Bois 1:410–11). In the decades after Emancipation, periodicals edited by African Americans continued to protest the treatment of African Americans, pushing for the granting of civil rights to African Americans and critiquing the destruction of property owned by African Americans, acts of violence against African Americans, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. But African American publishers paid a price for issuing such protests and demands: they often faced threats of violence and attempts to suppress the publication or distribution of their periodicals. Elements of protest largely dropped out of the black press in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, with a few important exceptions such as Ida B. Wellss Free Speech and Headlight and William Trotter's Boston Guardian}7 Another exception was Voice of the Negro, which Du Bois identified as a precursor to The Crisis and called "the greatest magazine which the colored people had had" before it ceased publication in 1907 ("The Colored Magazine in America" 33-34). The weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender would become an important publisher of protest, but it had not yet reached its peak when Du Bois launched The Crisis. There was a need, then, for more coverage of the wrongs done to African Americans; to Du Bois, the black press had a responsibility to report and protest such treatment.
Du Bois often was critical of periodicals he found too accommodationist, including those influenced by Booker T. Washington. Moreover, periodicals in Washington's camp were unlikely to include news about the NAACP, which Washington initially opposed. Such publications provided examples of the kinds of affirmative images Du Bois wanted to include, though, for many of them drew attention to the achievements of African Americans. Colored American Magazine, for example, included literature, black history, and biographies, as well as a column devoted to "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and one on "Famous Women of the Negro Race" (Johnson and Johnson 5). Numerous other periodicals of the time worked at redefining African Americans, and illustrations played important roles in many. Voice of the Negro, for instance, included both written and visual texts, and it showcased African Americans' achievements as well as protesting their mistreatment. The Crisis, then, became an important complement to existing publications, in terms of its protest and its role in publicizing the NAACP's activities; it also built on traditions in other black periodicals of using visual and written texts to redefine African American identity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Word, Image, and the New Negro by Anne Elizabeth Carroll. Copyright © 2005 Anne Elizabeth Carroll. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
ContentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Texts, Ideas, and Identities1. Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in The Crisis2. Objectivity and Social Change: Essays and News Stories in Opportunity3. The Arts as a Social Tool: Mixing Media in The Crisis and Opportunity4. Survey Graphic's Harlem Issue: Defining the New Negro as American5. Collective Identity in the Anthology: Representing the Race in The New Negro6. The Importance of Multiple Identities: Fire!! as an Avant-garde Arts MagazineConclusion: The Evolving PortraitNotesWorks CitedIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"The first detailed comparative analysis of the mix of text and illustration in the major African American magazines and anthologies of the 1910s and 1920s. It is a major advance in our understanding of what amounted to innovative collage forms articulated to race and politics. Carefully theorized and rich with persuasive readings, the book should appeal not only to literary scholars but also to anyone interested in modernity and the little magazine."
A very welcome contribution to the contemporary rethinking of the period. By calling our attention to the images that consistently and significantly appeared alongside some of the well-remembered texts of the Harlem Renaissance, Carroll foregrounds the very modernity that the New Negro Movement sought self-consciously to embrace. . . . Carroll's eye for the particular will have both a helpful and inspiring effect on readers who want to continue building on the work she has done here.
The first detailed comparative analysis of the mix of text and illustration in the major African American magazines and anthologies of the 1910s and 1920s. It is a major advance in our understanding of what amounted to innovative collage forms articulated to race and politics. Carefully theorized and rich with persuasive readings, the book should appeal not only to literary scholars but also to anyone interested in modernity and the little magazine.
The first detailed comparative analysis of the mix of text and illustration in the major African American magazines and anthologies of the 1910s and 1920s. It is a major advance in our understanding of what amounted to innovative collage forms articulated to race and politics. Carefully theorized and rich with persuasive readings, the book should appeal not only to literary scholars but also to anyone interested in modernity and the little magazine.
. . . a very welcome contribution to the contemporary rethinking of the period.
In tracing the formation of the idea of the New Negro through the vital interplay of literature, artand social criticism, Word Imageand the New Negro makes a superb contribution to scholarship on the Harlem Renaissancethe history of African American publishingand modern American culture.
In tracing the formation of the idea of the New Negro through the vital interplay of literature, artand social criticism, Word Imageand the New Negro makes a superb contribution to scholarship on the Harlem Renaissancethe history of African American publishingand modern American culture.