4.See the special issue Canons, Critical Inquiry 10 (Sept. 1983).
5.See I. A. Richards, intro. to Claude McKay, “Spring in New Hampshire” and Other Poems (London, 1920), and Allen Tate, intro. to Melvin B. Tolson, The Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (New York, 1953).
6.The “grandfather clause” was a provision in several southern state constitutions designed to enfranchise poor whites and disfranchise blacks by waiving high voting requirements for descendants of men voting before 1867.
7.Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, 2d ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1984), p. 326.
8.New York Times, 9 Aug. 1985, p. A3; New York Times, 14 Aug. 1985, p. A3; Ithaca Journal, 9 Aug. 1985, p. 9; Ithaca Journal, 10 Aug. 1985, p. 8.
9.William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1705; London, 1967), pp. 146, 147.
10.David Hume, “Of National Characters,” The Philosophical Works, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, 4 vols. (Darmstadt, 1964), 3:252 n. 1; my emphasis.
11.Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), p. 111.
12.Ibid., p. 113; my emphasis.
13.Mary Langdon, Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible (Boston, 1854), p. 116.
14.See James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars of Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince (Bath, 1770); John Marrant, Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black (London, 1785); Ottabah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1787); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself (London, 1789); and John Jea, The Life and Sufferings of John Jea, An African Preacher (Swansea, 1806).
15.Rebecca Cox Jackson, “A Dream of Three Books and a Holy One,” Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez (Amherst, Mass., 1981), pp. 146, 147.
16.Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York, 1982), p. 179.
17.Anthony Appiah, “Strictures on Structures: The Prospects for a Structuralist Poetics of African Fiction,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York, 1984), pp. 146, 145; all further references to this work, abbreviated “S,” will be included in the text.
SOURCE: “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 1–20. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL: www.jstor.org/stable/1343459. Accessed 12/08/2011.
PREFACE, THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK IN WESTERN ART
WITH DAVID BINDMAN
THE IMAGE OF the Black in Western Art was conceived by the late Dominique Schlumberger de Menil (1908–1997) and her husband, John (1904–1973), fifty years ago. The de Menils were known internationally for their patronage of artists such as René Magritte and Max Ernst as early as the 1930s, and eventually for the size and range of their art collection. Their passion for art led them to set up, among many other things, the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel in Houston. They also were widely respected for their commitments to human rights. Dominique de Menil originated the idea of collecting images of persons of African descent in Western art at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States as a subtle bulwark and living testimony against antiblack racism. She also viewed this project as a way to counter, implicitly, the legion of all-too-familiar racist and stereotypical images of black people in American and European popular art by unveiling the fact that for centuries—indeed millennia—canonical Western arts had included black figures in positive, sometimes realistic, and often celebratory ways in virtually every medium.
In launching this extraordinary project, the de Menils knitted two strands of their family’s passionate interests together into one unusual form. Dominique de Menil once said that she assumed the entire project would take about a year or so to complete, since no one at the time could have had any idea of the sheer scope and astonishing range of the presence of black images in the Western artistic tradition. A half century later, the project exists in the form of a photographic archive initially established in Houston by the Menil Foundation but now located in almost identical form at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, and at the Warburg Institute, University of London. These twin archives remain the bedrock of the project and contain more than 30,000 images, far more than can be reproduced in a series of published volumes.1 And the search for even more images of blacks in Western art continues.
The de Menils’ idea in launching this project was based on their belief in the benevolent—indeed, transforming—power of art and their alarm at the stubborn persistence of racial segregation in the United States, to which they had both immigrated from France during World War II. It is no accident that the project was born in the heart of the South. After John de Menil’s death, Dominique de Menil became even more actively involved in supervising the research and eventual publication of the initial volumes. In her preface to the first edition of Volume 1, she argues that works of art by master artists can reveal the common humanity of all people beyond the limits of conventional racial and social assumptions. Widely disseminated knowledge of and access to the beauty and range of these images could, she and her husband believed, be a source of pride and self-respect for Africans and African Americans, and might simultaneously promote greater tolerance and understanding of black people among white people. Art, in other words, could be drawn upon as another weapon in the fight against antiblack racism, both in America and throughout Europe. Black figures in great works of Western art might provide a window onto times in the past when, as Dominique de Menil put it a little wistfully, “ideals of fraternity blossomed” between Europeans and Africans, a time before the start of the African slave trade to Europe and the New World, a time when race-based slavery and Jim Crow segregation were not the basis of the dominant socioeconomic relationship between them or of the ways in which black people were “seen” and represented in Western culture. It was a noble idea, if perhaps characteristic of a more optimistic era than our own.
The de Menils were not the first to take a systematic interest in the representation of persons of African descent in European art. Grace Hadley Beardsley published a standard work, The Negro in Greek and Roman Civilization: A Study of the Ethiopian Type, in 1929, and she had noted that “the earliest important work on the subject” was J. Löwenherz’s Die Aetheiopen der altclassischen Kunst, published in 1861, “an important year in negro history.”2 Beardsley makes the salient point that Löwenherz’s study was undertaken precisely at the height of the abolition movement in the United States, in the first year of the Civil War. Similarly, publication of The Image of the Black was initiated at a turbulent time in the history of American race relations. Nonetheless, there is nothing explicit in the work of Löwenherz or Beardsley arguing that studying this subject might play a part in counteracting segregation or racial prejudice. At the other end of the scale from such works of scholarship were popular books like J. A. Rogers’s Sex and Race (three volumes, 1940–1944), which used representations of blacks in the history of Western art as evidence, as its subtitle, Negro Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands, indicates, to argue against current theories of racial essentialism. Regardless of the intentions of these authors, it had become clear by the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s that representations of black people in Western art could be drawn upon both as another front in the war against racism and to make the case for the inherent equality of freed slaves and their descendants.
The idea that a study of European images of blacks in art could be an antidote to prejudice was first adumbrated in its most sophisticated form by the great African American scholar and critic, Alain LeRoy Locke (1886–1954) in The Negro in Art of 1940.3 Locke, upon graduating from Harvard Colleg
e, became the first black Rhodes Scholar. After studying at Oxford University, he eventually returned to Harvard to become the first black person to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy there, in 1918. One of his areas of philosophical interest and expertise was aesthetics. He often wrote about art and its social uses, especially during the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement in part created by the massive anthology The New Negro, which he edited and published in 1925. In several of his own essays, in essays by others, such as the American inventor and art collector Alfred C. Barnes, and in lavish illustrations, many in color, Locke stressed the nature and function of art in society and its potential role in what he termed a necessary “reassessment” of the Negro, which he argued the Harlem Renaissance might effect. He brought various lines of his thought into a theory of art, race, and racial relations in The Negro in Art, the culmination of his thinking about Negro art and the Negro in art in the twenty years since he had completed his doctoral dissertation.
In this seminal book, Locke deepened his brief for the role of the arts in the Negro’s attempt to gain social equality and equal treatment before the law, arguing that “the deep and sustained interest of artists generally in the Negro subject, amounting in some instances to preoccupation with this theme, runs counter to the barriers and limitations of social and racial prejudice, and evidences appreciative insights which, if better known, might prove one of the strongest antidotes for prejudice.” Locke’s claim rests on a belief in the artist as vanguard, the artist’s superior aesthetic powers with the social hierarchy, and her or his ability to see beyond ordinary perceptions: “Here in this field, as in others, the eye of the artist vindicates its reputation for having in most instances broader, clear and deeper vision than ordinary.” On the other hand, Locke argues, art could naturalize racial prejudice at the same time as mitigating it: “This is not to gainsay that art, too, has its limiting formula, or that in still other instances art reflects and even caters to its contemporary social conventions. But even in so doing, the net effect of art is to reveal the bias rather than to conceal it, while the usual course of the best art is to transcend it with a freshly original point of view.”4 In artistic depictions of black figures throughout the Western tradition, Locke was spurred by the formally transforming uses of African art by the cubists to create bold new ways of representing the human form, starting with Picasso’s studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Locke maintained that ammunition could be found for deployment in the battle against antiblack racism where it had never occurred to anyone to look before: in the visual arts. As he had argued in The New Negro, if European artists could so fundamentally affect the world’s attitudes toward and regard for traditionally benighted African masks, for example, just think of the implications of the creation of a truly resonant American Negro artistic tradition, and of the adoption of the Negro as a subject for art made by white Americans and Europeans. This is exemplified by the drawings of the German immigrant artist Winold Reiss that pepper the text of his canonical anthology. It was a complex argument, and a subtle one, uniquely Locke’s own.
For Alain Locke, the sheer variety of physical types of blacks in European art acted as a solvent for the prevalent stereotypes that obtained in American society. He drew attention to the crucial importance of the fact that one of the Three Magi who visited the baby Jesus had since the late Middle Ages often been represented as a black man in paintings of The Adoration of the Magi. He pointed to paintings of blacks by Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Rubens, in which he discerned “a degree of virtuosity in technical expression and a penetration of emotional understanding.” He also argued, in a sign that even he was embedded in and valorized certain racialist ideas of his time, that “they caught, in addition to the particular model, that indefinable but tangible something we feel as race.” He saw something almost charming or engaging in paintings in which a great European gentleman or lady is accompanied by an adoring black slave: “even the late 17th and 18th Century tradition of the Negro page attendant, though grounded in slavery, still preserved something of the glamor of the exotic, investing that frequent figure with gaiety and charm.”5 While art could penetrate the superficial appearance of even a black person’s social station or status, suggesting the universal human core beneath, he seemed unaware that it also had the potential to invest slavery with a certain glamour: a two-edged sword.
The de Menils certainly would have known Locke’s book, if not Locke himself. However, there were more immediate influences on the generation of this research project, in particular the well-known Polish-French author and novelist Jean Malaquais (1908–1998), born Vladimir Malacki in Warsaw, who had been André Gide’s secretary and who moved between Paris and the United States, where he held several academic posts. Malaquais, like Locke, had strong views about the efficacy of art to effect social change. The de Menils also knew the work of the African American scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911–2007), like Locke a Harvard Ph.D. (in classics) and a colleague of Locke’s at Howard University. Snowden’s Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (1970) and subsequent books on this topic made him an obvious choice as one of the authors for the first volume in this multivolume work, on black images in the ancient world.
The de Menils were insistent that the proposed volumes (initially three were envisaged, covering works of art from European antiquity to the early twentieth century) should contain illustrations of exceptional quality, for which they commissioned a number of campaigns by outstanding photographers. They also employed as director of the archive and editor of the proposed volumes, a young Paris-trained art historian, Ladislas Bugner, who produced a detailed chronological scheme for the volumes, which has remained the basis for the choice of images in the published books. Some of the volumes would be published in two large parts and all were originally produced in both English and French editions, a nod to the increasingly troubled politics of race on both sides of the Atlantic, to the provenance of so much of the art being reproduced and, of course, to the de Menils’ native land. For various reasons, the volumes were not published in chronological order, leaving important historical gaps in the series’ first incarnation. That unfortunate fact, combined with the two-part structure of two of the published volumes, often led to confusion among readers about the scope and organization of the project. The first volume, titled From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in 1976. Volume II, From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery,” was published in two parts in 1979, while Volume IV, From the American Revolution to World War I, came out, also in two parts, in 1989. Review of these publications was uniformly enthusiastic and unstintingly full of praise. We are pleased that we are now publishing, in three parts, the third chronological volume, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition.6
Sometime after the death of Dominique de Menil on the last day of 1997—but not before Harvard honored her with an honorary doctorate—the Menil Foundation decided to discontinue the publication of The Image of the Black, though authors had already been commissioned for the remaining volumes. Almost immediately, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the director of the Du Bois Institute assumed responsibility for completing the project and fulfilling Dominique de Menil’s original plan. In 1993 Madame de Menil had transferred the archive, under the direction of Karen C.C. Dalton, to the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, where it was endowed through donations made by the Menil Foundation and various donors recruited by President Neil Rudenstine and by Gates. In 2005 the Du Bois Institute formally agreed to undertake the publication of the remaining volumes and to republish the existing volumes in the series, under the editorship of David Bindman and Professor Gates and the assistant editorship of Karen Dalton. This essay inaugurates this new series, [which will consist of ten books published with full color by Harvard University Press and] which includes texts written by a mixture of the original and newly commissioned authors. In addition to the original publishing sch
eme, a volume covering the twentieth century and a companion volume on the image of the black in African art are part of the Du Bois Institute’s project.
ENDNOTES
1.Both archives can be consulted by the public by appointment, and the photographs can also be accessed on the Internet by subscription through ARTSTOR.
2.Grace Hadley Beardsley, The Negro in Greek and Roman Civilization: A Study of the Ethiopian Type (Baltimore, 1929), p. ix.
3.Alain LeRoy Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art (New York, 1968 [1940]).
4.Ibid., pp. 3, 138.
5.Ibid., p. 139.
6.As early as 1980, John Russell had, in commending “the exalted nature of [the project’s] ambitions and . . . its beauty of presentation,” already complained of “the august slowness of its fulfillment” (New York Times, 29 June 1980), p. 7.
SOURCE: David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010).
THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY AND THE LANGUAGE OF SIGNIFYIN(G)
Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning
Some of the best dozens players were girls . . . before you can signify you got to be able to rap. . . . Signifying allowed you a choice—you could either make a cat feel good or bad. If you had just destroyed someone or if they were down already, signifying could help them over. Signifying was also a way of expressing your own feelings. . . . Signifying at its best can be heard when the brothers are exchanging tales.
—H. RAP BROWN
And they asked me right at Christmas
If my blackness, would it rub off?
I said, ask your Mama.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 31