Conscious Self-Realization and Self-Direction: New Negro Ideologies and the Confines of Visual Representations

This paper examines racial notions of gender as visually represented by two leading New Negro ideologues, W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey in late 1920s U.S. print culture. In their struggle for black self determination, both positioned themselves as agents in the production and reproduction of the meaning of race, racial signification, and racialized notions of gender. While Garvey and Du Bois have been portrayed as political and ideological rivals, their visual arguments about the New Negro in the early twentieth century were significantly aligned, constrained as they were by pervasive and powerful white supremacist images in the media, or what Stuart Hall called “racial regimes of representation.” Specifically, Garvey and Du Bois, both savvy visual propagandists, capitalized on their positions at the helm of print media publications with wide diasporic readerships to contest stereotypical imagery of black Americans, interrupting a framework of race relations built on what was then thought to be scientific racial categorizations and types. Using modern photographic technology and a relatively recent cultural turn to visuality, New Negroes challenged the immutability of race and racialization and presumed and acknowledged black subjectivity with both complex and conservative visual representations of black manhood and black femininity.