The Work of Art in the Age of Jim Crow

What is the relationship between anti-black racism in America and fascism in Europe? Recently, scholars such as James Q. Whitman and S. Jonathan Wiesen have described how Nazi Germany modeled its racial policies on Jim Crow America. In tracking how Nazi lawyers took legal inspiration from American Segregation, this work suggest that we might now be able to trace other lines of influence, asking for instance how Jim Crow era representations of race influenced Nazi propaganda. This paper looks to how black writers such as Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston understood the role of visual culture in the production of racial classification and segregation. For example, in his Farm Security Administration photo-essay, 12 Million Black Voices, Richard Wright positions his photo-text as a corrective to the tendency of mass culture to offer only narrow and negative representations of black life. Examining the role of visual culture in Jim Crow suggests an alternative genealogy for both Benjamin’s theory of mass culture and the place of fascism in American Art. I argue that fascists not only modeled their racist policies on American laws, but also borrowed from Jim Crow visual culture.