Images of Black modernism
Subtitle: verbal and visual strategies of the Harlem Renaissance
By: Miriam Thaggert
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9781558498303; 9781558498310
Description: "Focusing on the years from 1922 to 1938, this book revisits an important moment in black cultural history to explore how visual elements were used in poems, novels, and photography to undermine existing stereotypes. Miriam Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness. The work of the writers and artists under discussion reflects the creative tension between the intangibility of some forms of black expression, such as spirituals, and the materiality of the body evoked by other representations of blackness, such as 'Negro' dialect. By paying special attention to the contributions of photographers and other visual artists who have not been discussed in previous accounts of black modernism, Thaggert expands the scope of our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and contributes to a growing recognition of the importance of visual culture as a distinct element within, and not separate from, black literary studies"--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: a crisis in Black art and literature; title: Tone pictures: James Weldon Johnson's experiment in dialect; title: Reading the body: fashion, etiquette, and narrative in Nella Larsen's Passing; title: Surface effects: satire, race, and language in George Schuyler's Black no more and "the Negro-art hokum"; title: Collectin' Van Vechten: the narrative and visual collections of Carl Van Vechten; title: A photographic language: camera lucida and the photography of James Van Der Zee and Aaron Siskind; title: Conclusion. remembering Harlem: Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Harlem" exhibition.