During the 1920s and 1930s, black artists and writers achieved
something totally unprecedented: they created a new image of
African Americans that truly reflected their times as well as their
history. In so doing, they set the artistic agenda of the Harlem
Renaissance and gave form to some of its most compelling visions.
This innovative study examines the efforts of Harlem Renaissance
artists and writers to create a hybrid expression of black identity
that drew on their ancient past while participating in contemporary
American culture. Caroline Goeser investigates a critical component
of Harlem Renaissance print culture that until now has been largely
overlooked, arguing that illustrations became the most timely and
often most radical visual products of the movement.
This vibrant partnership between literary and visual talents-a
trail blazed by artist Aaron Douglas and poet Langston
Hughes-resulted in the image of the New Negro, one that remade the
African American past in order to foster greater participation in
modern American culture and commerce. Illustrations by Douglas,
James Wells, Gwendolyn Bennett, and others appeared on covers of
books about black American life and in journals such as Opportunity
and The Crisis. Goeser considers the strategies that these artists
developed to circumvent stereotypes and shows how their work was
received within the movement and in mainstream America.
Connecting visual imagery with literary text and commercial
enterprise, these illustrations participated in the modern economy
in ways that painting and sculpture could not. Goeser reveals how
Harlem Renaissance illustrators depicted the wide-ranging and
sometimes conflicting ideas about black identity held within the
community: African roots and Egyptian heritage, racial uplift and
gay pride. She shows how some artists revisited the Judeo-Christian
tradition by portraying a black Adam and Jesus, and examines the
interdependent relationships between race and sexuality in the work
of artists Richard Bruce Nugent and Charles Cullen, the former
black, the latter white.
Goeser clearly shows that, contrary to common belief, the visual
image of the New Negro was created by African Americans, for
African Americans. Her work assigns a central role to black artists
as cultural innovators intimately involved with the construction of
identity and new expressive paradigms and is a new touchstone in
understanding both the emergence of black identity and American
culture between the world wars.
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