| Throughout the twentieth century, many of the most well-known African American writers published volumes of poetry, fiction, and anthologies that were accompanied by visual illustration, done by African American and non-African American alike. Others engaged in collaborations with visual artists, and still others were strongly influenced by artists. The work ranged from illustrated magazines and anthologies that presented “Negro types” to fine arts magazines that embraced African visual forms and literary experimentation to collaborations, illustrated texts, and photographic books. Moreover, the writers and artists considered many similar issues: portrayals of African American identity, community, and history, and experiments with aesthetic form. Yet, despite the amount of work they produced, scholarship has all but ignored their efforts. This thesis seeks to correct that trend.; This dissertation thus has two aims. First, it documents the rich literary and visual material from the 1920s to the 1940s. While it concentrates primarily on African American writers and artists, it also includes discussions of non-African American writers and artists who worked with their African American peers to engage in black representation. Second, it argues that, during this era, what were ostensibly debates about aesthetic form were, in fact, debates about race. Writers, artists, and critics used their experiments in form in the service of racial representations. This dissertation focuses on individuals such as Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, Jean Toomer, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Zora Neale Hurston, Miguel Covarrubias, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Jacob Lawrence. In short, the form, production, and history of their interdisciplinary and cross-media literary and visual texts expose central debates about race and representation. The collaborations, illustrated books, and magazines thus became a locus for writers, artists, and critics to conceptualize the best form (however they defined this, if they did at all) for portrayals of African Americans. |
