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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Nadell, Martha. ""Nor Can I Reduce This Experience to a Medium": Race, Art, and Literature in America, 1920s-1940s," History of American Civilization, Harvard University, January 2001.
In December 1924, Vanity Fair proclaimed the arrival of the “New Negro.” With images by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias and captions by writer Eric Walrond, the magazine named the avatar of a new era in a spread entitled “Enter, The New Negro, a Distinctive Type Recently Created by the Coloured Cabaret Belt in New York.” A few months later, in March 1925, African American intellectual Alain Locke echoed these sentiments in an essay entitled “Enter the New Negro.” Who was this emergent New Negro? Who was the old Negro, who, according to Vanity Fair, had exited to make room for the New Negro and, according to Locke, against whom the New Negro was measured? Would there be another, newer New Negro who would replace that of the Harlem Renaissance? And, most importantly, how did writers, artists, critics, and others invent the Old Negro, the New Negro and their descendants? I answer these questions by focusing on race and representation in 1920s and 1930s-1940s “interartistic” work, which insists on the influence or useful tension between the visual and the textual. In the first period, Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and critics (Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman and others) invented their own New Negro, a modern, urban figure, best represented by modernist work and best defined in opposition to an earlier “Old Negro,” which they imagined as the visual and verbal stereotypes of the nineteenth century. The second period saw Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, E. Simms Campbell, and Richard Wright confronting not only elements of the Great Migration but also earlier representations. Instead of concentrating primarily on urban life, these authors and artists attempted to rehabilitate Southern folk life, politics, and African American history. In both periods, I examine the impulse not only to name and describe the New Negro but to paint, draw, and visually portray him.
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