Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Anne Elizabeth Carroll argues that pictures should matter as much as words in studies of Harlem Renaissance texts. Just as mainstream artists and scholars struggled in the interwar years to express a distinct national character, Black Americans sought to stake their place within the development of that identity. Carroll enters the debate on the ultimate effectiveness of efforts of New Negro leadership to shape African American identity with a study of five key publications.

Starting with the NAACP national magazine, The Crisis, and the National Urban League's monthly, Opportunity, Carroll argues that previous studies of these publications favored the written texts over the visual texts, thereby ignoring significant material in understanding the social and political goals of the editors (W. E. B. Du Bois at The Crisis and Charles S. Johnson at Opportunity). For example, she points to the regular use of photographs of successful African Americans (mostly male) in both magazines to offset negative reports of racial prejudice and group struggle. The mix, she says, offered "a multi-pronged response to the racism that faced African Americans in the early 1920s and a multi-media redefinition of African American identity" (87). Even as close readings of key texts provide fresh insights into the material, readers would be served with the inclusion of more historical context to provide deeper understanding of the debates in which the leaders engaged.

Carroll turns next to a pair of publications produced under the direction of Alain Locke: the March 1925 special issue of Survey Graphic, which focused upon Harlem, and the subsequent expanded book published a year later as The New Negro. Carroll ends her book with the one-issue publication of Fire!!, edited by Wallace Thurman, and produced through the efforts of a team of "younger" Harlem artists that included Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Richard Bruce Nugent. Carroll argues that "the range of images available in these volumes is a challenge to the process of stereotyping, the process of reducing individuals and groups of people to simplified, homogenous entities" (224). She points out that as all the publications shared in the use of multiple kinds of texts (sociological, literary, visual, statistical, etc.), they increasingly provided an appropriately diverse picture of Black America. This central argument is the strength of Carroll's book.

Carroll's call for more interdisciplinary approaches that account for visual as well as written messages offers potential for fuller readings of both. Her own analysis of visual texts reflects the limits of her training as a literary scholar as she relies too heavily on the written texts as a lens to read the visuals. Her book, nonetheless, invites more study along these lines. Carroll's book would serve well in an upper-level undergraduate course as an introductory study of the interaction of texts and visuals in American magazines of the twentieth century. Her ideas are generally clear (if sometimes repetitive) and easy to follow. As the debates regarding the effectiveness of identity efforts continue, delving deeper into the varieties of Harlem Renaissance texts gives us more to think about.