Mining Images of Race and Gender in Twentieth-Century Black Popular Periodicals

It is difficult to deny the value that text mining holds for humanistic analysis of large periodical data sets. A corpus of newspapers, for example, can be easily mined for keywords that can provide greater understanding and generate new questions about an array of topics. However, images of magazine covers and images extracted from within periodicals obviously are not open to these methods of analysis and do not provide the necessary conditions to make text mining a useful process for understanding their significance. Early twentieth-century popular periodicals used compelling visual images to construct and shape modern American culture. Indeed, we might argue that the visual image was at the heart of modernism. This is all the more important when we consider how much periodical editors and publishers relied on a developing visual culture to tell stories to, inform, and entertain their modern readers. Modern periodicals, then, with their heavy emphasis on visual images and representations, confound textual analysis tools and require ones that consider the image as an object of analysis.

This issue is of particular importance when we consider the ways that early twentieth-century African American intellectuals and cultural producers politicized images in periodicals to dismantle racist stereotypes. When popular black magazines appeared on the scene, they became part of a culture that had long assigned negative meanings to black bodies. Largely viewed as subhuman by white society, black Americans were the measuring sticks by which whites could gauge their own citizenship and morality. Even though black Americans lacked the economic and political capital that would enable them to wage substantive battles in other realms of life, they successfully launched a “war of the image” in black periodicals and soundly rejected racial ideologies designed to subjugate their humanity. As one strategy in this war, temporal and aesthetic explorations of modernism in popular black periodicals were infused with the early twentieth-century concept of the New Negro. Rooted in the rejection of racist stereotypes and emblematic of a newly urbanized and cosmopolitan image of African Americans, the New Negro exemplified a new front on which African Americans might fight discrimination. The concept of the New Negro was popularized, in part, in a special edition of the magazine, Survey Graphic, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” and edited by philosopher and father of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke. Magazines were fundamental to the construction and representation of the New Negro and a modern black identity. Just as importantly, visual markers of the intersection between race and gender on popular black magazine covers and within their pages also served to constitute, in part, notions of black modernity. Noliwe Rooks indicates that magazines and newspapers featured African American women prominently, making them synonymous with New Negro ideology.¹

Visual cultural analysis in black periodical studies, then, is far from simple. It is deeply inflected and nuanced by the intersecting politics of race, class and gender. In a similar manner, digital approaches to analyzing images must be intersectional. Modern periodicals, magazines, and newspapers, particularly black ones, are more conducive to digital tools that allow scholars to engage in a praxis of visual analysis that captures the inter-relational properties of identity and oppression. Yet, at this moment, digital processes and tools that can help us to deepen our analysis and understanding of racial images in periodicals are limited. Image mining of racial images in modern periodicals has yet to occur on any large scale. There are, however, digital humanities projects that have used face-detection software and other technologies to make claims about the political and social meaning of racial phenotype. For example, Kate Bagnell and Tim Sherratt’s “The Real Face of White Australia” in their Invisible Australians project use digital technologies to show how racial policies are designed to maintain white hegemony. The project extracted and digitized early twentieth-century Australian government portraits of non-white Australians who were placed under surveillance and discriminated against by the government in an effort to support a white racial hegemony that denied the existence of non-Europeans of color who resided...