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QU I E T as it's kept, there's a visual paradox at the center of African American thought. Simultaneously, there is a preoccupation with visual culture and a neglect of visual art and artists. Cultural critic Michele Wallace has noted this phenomenon and flagged it "the problem of the visual in Afro- American culture."1 This problem, she suggests, manifests itself in various entangled ways: as a heightened interest in issues of visibility; as an uneasiness with seeing, particularly situations where "race collides with gender"; and as a disavowal of the work of black visual artists.2 By way of introduction, I want to pursue Michele Wallace's insights by sketching some of the contours of this paradox of a concern with visual culture matched by a lack of interest in the work of black visual artists in twentieth-century African American thought. Specifically, I want to lay bare this visual conundrum during two key moments in African American cultural and intellectual history. After exposing this paradox, I want to introduce the purpose of this book: to show the intrinsic connections between images and objects and African American studies and, in doing so, to challenge the entrenched practice of disregarding visual art and artists in the field.
The visual paradox in African American thought was likely established at the turn of the twentieth century when the leading African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois both praised the spirituals created during slavery and apologized for the material culture produced afterwards. Within the pages of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois declared the sorrow songs to be "the most beautiful expression of human experience" and "the greatest gift of the Negro people." In the same volume, however, he also proposed that the "contradiction of double aims"-to escape the contempt of whites and to create for the masses of black people-made the newly freed black artisan a "poor craftsman" and mired the black artist in "confusion and doubt."3 This simultaneous privileging of black music and negating of black material and visual art by a powerful and otherwise visually engaged cultural critic-who, for example, led the NAACP campaign that decried D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation as visual propaganda-has been customary in African American studies since the publication of Du Bois's influential volume in 1903.
Scholars in African American studies, with hefty support and encouragement from others, have routinely devalued black visual production either openly or through a process of benign neglect. Following Du Bois's early assessment, scholars have often implied that art by African Americans was lacking, by either avoiding the topic or hastily redirecting inquiry toward the more universally heralded forms of black creativity. Black music, as Michele Wallace makes clear, has been frequently used to deflect attention away from the visual arts.4 It is constantly touted for its power, originality, and genius.
Black dance and, more recently, black letters are also confidently lauded in many mainstream and academic venues as more vital than the visual arts. This disregard for the visual production of African American artists, however, is strikingly ironic and worthy of reflection because, historically, black intellectuals have been acutely aware of and concerned with the power of visual culture. Since the New Negro movement of the 1920s, black scholars and activists have expended an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources attempting to influence visual terrain. Concerned with history, representation, aesthetics, ideology, and their relationships, they have vigorously debated these issues with the belief that increased control of the visual sphere would aid struggles for equality and black liberation. Yet, curiously, much of this formidable intellectual and activist energy has been coupled with a palpable hesitancy regarding the significance of visual art and artists. This visual conundrum is strikingly apparent in two of the most important African American cultural and intellectual movements of the twentieth century: the New Negro movement of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
ART AND PROPAGANDA: THE NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT During the New Negro movement, or Harlem Renaissance, of the 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois in his role as activist-editor of the NAACP's Crisis magazine instigated a heated and sustained dialogue about the relationship between art and propaganda as well as artistry and advocacy in the Jazz Age context of racist violence, mass movement, gross inequity, and buoyant optimism. At the time, Du Bois held less faith than many of his contemporaries that a "New Negro" cultural movement would improve social conditions; however, the brilliant and fiery activist-editor did conceive of creative expression as a powerful tool in the movement for racial progress. During the 1920s, Du Bois both actively promoted forms of expression that he believed helped advance the race and aggressively denounced forms of expression that he thought hindered it. In the mid-1920s, amidst a surge of popular culture laden with what he decried as "sordid, foolish and criminal" Negro characters, Du Bois tried to establish and enforce criteria for images by and of African Americans. To do this, the editor printed a questionnaire in the February 1926 issue of Crisis magazine and launched a symposium called "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed." The primary focus of Du Bois's questionnaire was the representation of black Americans. Central were topics such as the artist's-white or black-responsibility in his or her portrayal of black Americans, the temptation to depict characters of a less privileged class, and the actions members of the race should take in responding to negative characterizations.
Replete with visual connotations and wholly reliant on the language of painting, one question asked, "What are Negroes to do when they are continually painted at their worst and judged by the public as they are painted?" Similarly, another question asked, "Is not the continual portrayal of the sordid, foolish and criminal among Negroes convincing the world that this and this alone is really and essentially Negroid, and preventing white artists from knowing any other types and preventing black artists from daring to paint them?" Underlying these anxious queries was Du Bois's fear that white audiences were seeing too much of the black "underworld" and too little of the "talented tenth." Yet despite that images in visual as well as literary culture appeared to be the cause of Du Bois's anxiety and that the language of the visual arts informed his questions, he turned solely to the world of letters for answers. Over the next ten months, twenty-two responses to the questionnaire were published, and virtually all the respondents were writers, editors, or publishers.
Not one of the respondents was directly connected to the art world.5 In this way, African American visual artists were entirely excluded from the visually charged conversation about the representation of black Americans during the Jazz Age. Their exclusion from this sustained and heated dialogue was seemingly unwarranted, because African American visual artists were grappling with some of the same questions during the period. For example, the "New Negro" dialogue about the imaging of black Americans could easily have been enriched by discussions of painter Archibald Motley's Prohibitionera nightlife scenes, James VanDerZee's bourgeois portraits, and the workingclass subjects of Palmer Hayden's urban genre scenes. In addition, the conversation could have been enhanced by the inclusion of the philosopher and aesthetician Alain Locke's ideas about the relationship between creative expression and social change, which he had discussed in his 1925 anthology The New Negro.6
Although W.E.B. Du Bois's Jazz Age agitation was partially visual-he was concerned with what imagemakers were creating and what audiences were seeing -and the language he employed to address his concerns was visually resonant, the influential activist-editor neglected to include visual artists in his public symposium. This omission suggested to his large and literate audience either that there were no African American visual artists grappling with the vital issues of representation or that their particular concerns would not add new insights to the spirited dialogue. In effect, the omission of visual artists from the 1920s conversation on how "Negroes are painted" rendered invisible those who actually worked most directly with paint.