Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (review)

Enter the New Negroes supplies a richly-detailed discussion of the "interartistic" efforts by some of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance to re-conceive valid "New Negro" identity and self-presentation in texts and images. Literary scholar Martha Jane Nadell's concept of an interartistic cultural work emerges from ages-old attempts "[to formulate] theories about the similarities and dissimilarities between the 'sister arts' of literature and visual art" and the problems posed when they are paired in ways that suggest some realistic reinforcement of a written message (7). Focusing on eight Harlem-originated publications that were designed to show as well as tell modern America who the heterogeneous "New Negroes" were, Nadell examines the relationship between text and image in light of their various creators' expressed intentions, their choices, their precedents and influences, and some of the critical responses to their work. The consequence of this complex examination, presented in a wholly uncomplicated style, is a widely useful resource for students and scholars of American literature, cultural studies, the visual arts, integrative studies, and comparative literature. At the same time, this study confirms Harlem and the wider New York cultural scene as the stage of New Negro presencing, with literary scholar and cultural critic Alain Locke as the implied director, if not producer.

The eight Harlem-originated interartistic publications spanned twenty-four years (1925–1948), involved at least two "generations" of Harlem intellectuals and artists, and, thanks to special attention to their graphic properties, pressed traditional text genres into the service of the New Negro visualization project. Thus, genres focused on society, folklore, history, and poetry, with some innovative Harlem twists on visual representation, played an active new role as performative media. Five chapters of Nadell's book explore these media in detail, following a preliminary chapter that describes and displays the kinds of representations that led to stereotypical notions of African Americans in the minds of many generations of white Americans. Thus, Nadell provides the backdrop for Alain Locke's (and others') "entrance" of the New Negro onto the public scene.

The first three publications studied are the similar yet deliberately revised versions of Alain Locke's vision of New Negro identity. The first is the "New Negro issue" of Survey Graphic magazine, entitled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" (March 1925). Locke then later transformed this special issue, which he edited, into a longer book version entitled The New Negro: An Interpretation (late 1925). This volume was then enhanced in a 1927 reprint that added two poems, more bibliography, and five more drawings by African American artist Aaron Douglas. All three versions of Locke's work feature a variety of photographs, illustrations, and other graphics, though Nadell displays primarily Winold Reiss's illustrations, called "types." Paying particular attention to the changes in the graphic contents across these three works, Nadell argues that Locke's editorial decisions drew from his evolving understanding of the dangers of establishing "correct" types and norms that would homogenize and stereotype African-American identities anew, in the same ways that derogatory representations had been created by pre-Harlem and contemporaneous non-African-American illustrators and photographers. Nadell sees Locke's efforts as urging the trend in representation away from homogenizing ethnographic "types" and reductive modernist treatments of presumed exotic-primitive African and African-American culture. Instead, she sees Locke shaping the trend toward "representative" individuals depicted in portraits of famous persons, in illustrations of persons of frank, serious deportment, and in other complex works that require rather advanced interpretive skills (such as Aaron Douglas's bold drawings).

This transition in practices of visualizing the New Negroes, however, was no simple, linear progression. True to her method, stated in the introduction of Enter the New Negroes, of problematizing the relationship between the paired texts and images in interartistic works, Nadell points out and explains incongruities between what the Harlem figures claimed they intended to do and...