Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (review)

In Images of Black Modernism, Miriam Thaggert argues that many artists of the Harlem Renaissance experimented with language and image in order to combat the general public’s tendency to regard mental images of the black body as a metonym of an entire race. Thaggert sets out to “expand the frame within which the Harlem Renaissance and its legacy have been conceived by examining artists and writers whose work did not respond to the problem of representation within the conventional terms of the period” (18). Thaggert contends that scholars who “comprehend the visual imperative of narrative” underlying questions of black representation will better understand American modernism and the aesthetic pressures that have shaped African American literature (27). The conventional terms of black representation, Thaggert notes, are exemplified in the February 1926 issue of the magazine The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, which posed questions to black artists in order to “promote idealized, aspirational depictions of African Americans” (2). The introduction to Images provides an overview of The Crisis controversy and proposes a proper image/image proper chiasmus that usefully distills the tension between depicting images that could/should be versus images that are.

Thaggert’s first extended discussion of an artist figuring the “mental image” of the black body in unconventional ways centers on James Weldon Johnson’s experiments with dialect in God’s Trombones (1927) (44). In her second chapter, “Reading the Body: Fashion, Etiquette, and Narrative in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Thaggert employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social and symbolic capital and Roland Barthes’s concept of the fashion system to discuss the concealing and revealing of blackness in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Thaggert supports her ideas about the depth of anxieties over the contingency of blackness in these works by evidencing the operation of racial signifiers in a real-life court case: the interracial marriage between Leonard Rhinelander and Alice Jones and its subsequent annulment (a case mentioned in Larsen’s Passing). For Thaggert, Jones’s disrobing in front of a jury in order to prove her husband’s prior knowledge of her racial identity demonstrates the politico-social significance of rigid delineations of blackness, especially in female bodies, that is both mirrored and challenged in the literature and photography of the period.

Thaggert’s last four chapters are her most associative and interdisciplinary, dealing with George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926), the photography of James Van Der Zee and Aaron Siskind, and the 1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition. Remarking on the often unwelcome tendency of Schuyler’s acerbic satire to destabilize conceptions of blackness and whiteness and for Van Vechten’s irony to do the same in photos and in fiction, Thaggert engages with verbal-visual interconnectedness. This engagement prepares the way for her contrast between the photography of Van Der Zee and Siskind and the ways in which their photography was used in the marketing of an idea of the Harlem Renaissance during the racially charged moment of the 1969 “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition.

While Thaggert contributes to the critical conversations around each of her subjects, her chapter on “The Narrative and Visual Collections of Carl Van Vechten” deserves special mention. As if in response to calls from Chidi Ikonne and Kathleen Pfeiffer for more substantive treatment of Nigger Heaven, Thaggert carefully incorporates the many controversies that have led to the dismissal of the novel by seeking “not to condemn or to apologize . . . but to explain several taken-for-granted contradictions concerning [Van Vechten’s] role and his best-selling novel” (115). Thaggert’s explanations come vis-à-vis metaphors of collection and exhibition, asserting that “Van Vechten presents Harlem as a museum attraction, an assemblage of black bodies on display” and that “Nigger Heaven functions as a...