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“Who Are You America but Me?”: The American Negro Exposition, 1940

Jeffrey Helgeson

in The Black Chicago Renaissance

This chapter considers the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair that sought to showcase African American artists on a national stage. It delineates the ... More

This chapter considers the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair that sought to showcase African American artists on a national stage. It delineates the diversity of voices and competing visions of racial progress that defined the character of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Historians have described the exposition as a failure; the event did not attract mass audiences, and it did not create a broader public debate about the meanings of black identity, legacies of slavery, or contemporary discrimination in the United States. Yet, by examining the exposition as presented, rather than what it failed to be, the chapter uncovers important and sometimes surprising influences on the fair's messages.Less

I New Forms and Captive Knights in the Age of Jim Crow and Mechanical Reproduction

James Smethurst

in The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

This book endeavors to delineate some of the ways that the establishment of Jim Crow as a national system, albeit with considerable regional and local variations, and the response of African American ... More

This book endeavors to delineate some of the ways that the establishment of Jim Crow as a national system, albeit with considerable regional and local variations, and the response of African American artists and intellectuals, especially Paul Laurence Dunbar, to this profound ideological, political, economic, spatial, and cultural event deeply marked American notions of modernity—and, ultimately, modernism—for both African Americans and white Americans. By looking at some of the different strands in the development of a modern African American literature between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the New Negro Renaissance, we can discern how some black writers came to feel a need for the creation of a distinct African American literature representing, channeling, and serving some notion of a black “people” or “nation.”Less

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

Lindon Barrett

Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. Mcbride, and John Carlos Rowe (eds)

in Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay ... More

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.Less

‘Death to any one that puts his foot in No Man[’s] Land’: ‘Afromodernist’ Reimagining and Aesthetic Experimentation in Horace Pippin’s World War I Manuscripts and Paintings

Celeste-Marie Bernier

in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

This chapter analyzes the experienced and representative significance of World War I to the work of African American artists and writers who rejoined the civilian population following the end of the ... More

This chapter analyzes the experienced and representative significance of World War I to the work of African American artists and writers who rejoined the civilian population following the end of the war. It explores the interwoven aesthetic intricacies of the manuscripts and paintings of Horace Pippin, and other writers and artists of his generation and experience, who provided first-hand aesthetic reflections of the terrible nature of modern warfare, which were often written out of this most significant of modern events — one frequently configured as a white European tragedy. Grappling with a context in which black military experiences were caricatured or erased in white mainstream representations, their artistic and literary production confirms the Great War as the ‘locus of Afromodernism par excellence’.Less

Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue

Ethelene Whitmire

in Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement ... More

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement marked by increased literary, musical, and artistic creativity by African American artists who wanted to challenge the prevailing stereotypical representation of their image. Writers and artists came from all over the United States to participate. In Los Angeles, writer Wallace Thurman encouraged fellow post-office worker Arna Bontemps to go to Harlem. Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to move to New York City. All of these great thinkers, writers, and artists would pass through the 135th Street Branch, where Regina was assigned.Less

From Black Belt to Bronzeville

Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach

in Along the Streets of Bronzeville: Black Chicago's Literary Landscape

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt ... More

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt and ending with heralding itself as “Bronzeville,” the chapter examines the interaction of newly arrived migrants with previously settled African Americans that bloomed into an exciting community. It specifically analyzes two popular intersections in the South Side of Chicago—the “Stroll” district (the intersection of 35th and State Streets) during the early 1920s, and the intersection at 47th and South Parkway. This intersection, along with the Stroll, served as foundations and sources of work for famed African American musicians, artists, and writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks.Less

Conclusion: Queering Representation

GerShun Avilez

in Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

This concluding chapter discusses the significance of the concept of representation to nationalist discourse. Representation in the political world and the idea of cultural representation both appear ... More

This concluding chapter discusses the significance of the concept of representation to nationalist discourse. Representation in the political world and the idea of cultural representation both appear to demand a stable point of reference. However, cultural producers disruptively inhabit frameworks of representation as an element of their aesthetic radical practices. The chapter then examines visual artist Howardena Pindell alongside lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dune because they produce works in which Black bodies become visually inaccessible. The reluctance to represent is a vital component of these artists' respective projects. Ultimately, the chapter documents how cultural producers challenge the idea that social realities oblige African American artists to produce work engaged in progressive politics.Less

Muddying Clear Waters: Carolyn Rodgers’s Black Art

Carmen L. Phelps

in Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement

This chapter discusses Carolyn Rodgers’s poetic works in her poetry collections, including Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969). It explains that Rodgers’ poetry showed that the concept ... More

This chapter discusses Carolyn Rodgers’s poetic works in her poetry collections, including Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969). It explains that Rodgers’ poetry showed that the concept of Black Art was not a “fixed” one, but rather, something that varies and changes its form, function, and meaning with each piece of work produced by African American artists. In her first poetic works, Rodgers pointed out that the goal of defining the role of the Black Arts writer continued to be an essential preoccupation for self-acclaimed Black Arts Movement participants, as the movement wanted writers to position themselves within unwavering spaces of political expression and cultural representation.Less

The Revolution Will Be Visualized: Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas

Colette Gaiter

in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

This chapter examines the work of artist Emory Douglas. In 1967, a young man barely in his twenties, Douglas was named Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. His visual skills, combined ... More

This chapter examines the work of artist Emory Douglas. In 1967, a young man barely in his twenties, Douglas was named Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. His visual skills, combined with the Panther leaders’ sharp verbal rhetoric, resulted in the graphically explosive Black Panther newspaper that embodied the group’s concept of revolution through self-empowerment. Over the course of his tenure as Minister of Culture, which ended in the early 1980s, Douglas used revolutionary art to empower African Americans in a post-Civil Rights Act, everyday-in-the-streets struggle. In concert with the goals of the Panther Party, Douglas’s body of work played a major role in two formations that continue to grow—black cultural liberation and the increasing dominance of images over words in cultural production.Less