Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance

8. “The Spell of Africa Is Upon Me”: W.E.B. DuBois’s Notion of Art as Propaganda

8. “The Spell of Africa Is Upon Me”: W.E.B. DuBois’s Notion of Art as Propaganda Alessandra Lorini Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. Its very names reveal its mystery and wide-reaching influence. It is “Ethiopia” of the Greek, the “Kush” and “Punt” of the Egyptian, and the Arabian “Land of the Blacks.” To modern Europe it is the “Dark Continent.” —W.E.B. DB, The Negro (1915) Late in 1926, DuBois discussed “The Criteria of Negro Art.” He was concerned that politics was abandoning the Harlem Renaissance and that the New Negro movement was turning into a mere search for recognition of its individual artists. DuBois pointed out that white publishers expected “Uncle Toms,” “good darkies,” and clowns as Negro characters and were ready to reward those authors providing them. He also admitted the existence of a few successful Negro artists, but in his view these were “the remnants of that ability and genius among us whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised to the tidal waves of chance.” To him, the “apostle of beauty” was “the apostle of truth.” DuBois declared, accordingly: Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent. (D. L. Lewis 1994, 103) DuBois warned against the seductive idea that there was no use in fighting, and that creative talents should do great things and get the reward they deserved . Fighting was crucial, in DuBois’s view, because the color line was still an imposing presence: that a black woman sculptress could not find a school in New York willing to accept her meant that the “Negro question,” with all its unglamorous battles for the ballot, education, jobs, and housing, was still a priority (101). 159 In The Crisis, during the same year (1926), DuBois reviewed Alain Locke’s The New Negro and made similar points. He found the book excellent but disagreed with Locke’s idea that “Beauty rather than Propaganda should be the object of Negro literature and art.” DuBois saw the danger that the Negro Renaissance would lead to “a search for disembodied beauty which is not really a passionate effort to do something tangible.” He recognized that this controversy was as old as the world, but if Locke’s thesis was insisted on too much, it would “turn the Negro Renaissance into decadence” (Aptheker 1977, 78–79). DuBois detected a visible sign of this decadence in McKay’s Home to Harlem , which he reviewed in 1928 in The Crisis together with Larsen’s Quicksand and anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s The American Negro.1 Editor DuBois liked Larsen’s book but found McKay’s nauseating. “After the dirtier parts of its filth,” a dismayed DuBois wrote, “I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Although he admitted that the book included some good stuff in the way its author portrayed characters, he could not tolerate McKay’s giving in to the “prurient demand” of a “certain decadent section of the white American world” centered in New York, which longed for unrestrained passions and wanted to see them written in black and white and “saddled on black Harlem.” In the same review, DuBois praised Herskovits’s work. He found Franz Boas’s pupil a real scientist that is, “a man who is more interested in arriving at truth than proving a thesis of race superiority.” At the end of an extensive research of physical anthropology, Herskovits had concluded that American Negroes were forming a new racial type that was a mixture of African, American, Indian, and Caucasian ancestry and were likely to remain physically distinctive for a long time. DuBois welcomed Herskovits’s findings. They gave evidence that fewer than one-fourth of the Negroes in the United States were of unmixed Negro blood, and that forty percent of them had as much, or even more, white blood as they did Negro. According to DuBois, this showed the unsoundness of the argument that the Negro was an inassimilable race in the United States and the idiocy of discussing American Negroes...