Criteria of Modern Art: W. E. B. Du Bois Experiments, 1899-1928

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how the Black American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois mobilized various visual media and strategies to challenge white supremacy between 1899 and 1928. Over three chapters, I demonstrate how travel and cross-cultural exchange catalyzed, informed, or modified Du Bois’s aesthetic strategies. The general routes that I illuminate are Atlanta – Paris in 1899-1900; Eastern Seaboard – Berlin between 1906 and 1927; and Harlem – Moscow between 1925 and 1928. Though this dissertation focuses on Du Bois, it situates him in relation to and conversation with many other major figures. Some are often found in discussions of Du Bois—for example, the writer Alain Locke, painter Aaron Douglas, and photographer Thomas Askew. But others—including the Weimar artist Hannah Höch, German-Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan, and Soviet writer and photographer Sergei Tret’iakov—rarely appear in the existing literature. Yet as I show, these figures and Du Bois were active at the same time, shared overlapping interests, and may well have crossed paths. Chapter One investigates the multimedia project that Du Bois and his collaborators produced for the “Exposition des Nègres d’Amerique” at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Titled The Georgia Negro, the project included 363 photographs in four albums, 36 data visualizations and maps, and three handwritten volumes of legal codes. Chapter Two examines Du Bois’s embrace of the historical pageant, a popular medium that could feature thousands of amateur participants and combined music, dance, and theater. His pageant The Star of Ethiopia appeared in New York City in 1913, Washington D.C. in 1915, Philadelphia in 1916, and Los Angeles in 1925. Chapter Three focuses on Du Bois’s declarations about art and propaganda but situates them against both the Harlem Renaissance and his trip to the Soviet Union in 1926. This dissertation not only examines Du Bois’s approaches within their original historical contexts but also tells a story about how they change over the course of three decades. My overarching argument is that Du Bois’s aesthetic experiments are best understood as modernist ones. Each chapter explicates a particular experiment that resonates with quintessential modernist themes: uncertainty and motivation, ethnology and the ethnological museum, and aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy. In doing so, this dissertation recovers the very radicality of Du Bois’s practice and reimagines our narratives of modernisms, our criteria of modern art.