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This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the resurgence of a popularly rooted Black nationalism and the associated emergence of new modes of thinking and organizing as it related to African American art, intellectual work, and social activism. By chronicling the strained professional relationship between the magazine owner, John H. Johnson, and Fuller, the magazine’s editor, the chapter illuminates the intraracial struggle between an emergent group of Black nationalists and a more established elite class of African American liberals. This struggle was perfectly encapsulated in Fuller’s efforts to undermine what he deemed as the bourgeois Negro politics of JPC. By advancing “Black” as a counter to JPC’s dominant discourse, Fuller used Negro Digest as an influential print mechanism in the production and amplification of an alternative politics for African Americans.

This chapter focuses on abstract painter Howardena Pindell and her controversial Free, White, and 21 (1980), a video art piece in which Pindell—playing all parts—staged a dialogue between reincarnations of herself and a caricature of a white feminist who callously debunks the veracity of her experiences. The chapter interprets the video as a black feminist counterpublic that is not simply about critique, but also racism-as-trauma; furthermore, it detail Pindell’s performative engagements with cross-racial embodiment and avatar-play. Yet, in efforts to contextualize both the video’s content and Pindell’s career, the chapter begins with an examination of the various political and artistic communities Pindell participated in, or was denied access to, in the late 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, the chapter’s aim is to render visible not only the manifold tensions that arose from the merging of art and politics in this period, but more explicitly the difficulties in being a black woman artist excluded from avant-garde circles (both black and white), partly for making abstract work that was deemed not sufficiently “black.” The last part of the chapter discusses Pindell’s vociferous rebuke of “art world racism” through her involvement in PESTS, an anonymous arts organization. It turns to PESTS’s remains—a flyer, poster replicas, and two obscure newsletters—that serve as public engagements with the invisibility, exclusion, and tokenism faced by artists of color.