Chapter 5 - The Visual Image in New Negro Renaissance Print Culture

Summary

Goeser explores the work of visual artists, who worked alongside writers, cultural leaders, editors, and publishers to animate the pages and covers of journals, little magazines, and books with graphic images. She identifies the strategies of Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, Richard Bruce Nugent, and many others, to radically re-picture Black American identity – to make Black modern. Goeser argues that by providing visual components integral to Harlem Renaissance texts, Douglas and his fellow artists revised older illustrative methods that relied solely on mimicry of specific lines from a text. Strategically creating a dynamic interplay between word and image, they engaged with texts in a double-voiced narrative, wielding an independent visual language in active dialog with New Negro prose and poetry to form a new iconography of Black agency.