Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Barbara Biesecker

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

Hearing the Hurt

Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement

ERIC KING WATTS

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2012

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Bembo

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watts, Eric King, 1963–

Hearing the hurt : rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics of the New Negro Movement / Eric King Watts.

p. cm. — (Rhetoric, culture, and social critique)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1766-9 (trade cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8616-0 (ebook)

1. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. 2. Harlem Renaissance. 3. African Americans—Race identity—History—20th century. 4. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 5. African Americans—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title.

E185.89.I56W37 2012

973'.0496073—dc23

2012000097

Cover: Winold Reiss, Drawing in Two Colors (Interpretation of Harlem Hazz I), ca. 1915– 1920. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

For the energies responsible for my birth, growth, and sustenance—my parents and my wife and children, Lynne, Tylen, and Tiana

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Hearing the Hurt

2. Of Beauty and Death: W. E. B. Du Bois's Darkwater

3. The Last and Best Gift of Africa: Du Bois, Dewey, and a Black Public

4. Negro Youth Speaks: Alain Locke and The New Negro

5. A Lampblacked Anglo-Saxon: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes in the Nation

6. All Art Is Propaganda: The Politics of a New Negro Aesthetics

7. Paul's Committed Suicide: A Utopist Tragedy in Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring

8. You Mean You Don't Want Me, ’Rene?: Anxiety, Desire, and Madness in Nella Larsen's Passing

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The very idea of writing acknowledgments is both exhilarating and daunting. This sort of work arises out of spaces and times populated by folks who will be remembered here and by persons who will be sadly overlooked. I begin, therefore, by asking for your empathy as I approach a task that cannot be adequately accomplished. To all those unnamed, I thank you.

First, the lights shine on a group of persons who have sparked my imagination and set me off on productive paths. Michael J. Hyde has been generous beyond belief for opening up inspirational dwelling places and conversations. Earl Smith is a consistent and masterful mentor. Ever since we were classmates at Northwestern University, Kirt Wilson has been a great friend and even greater interlocutor. While on leave in 2004, I spent some extremely rewarding weeks visiting the University of Minnesota. I am very grateful to the faculty, staff, and graduate students of the Department of Communication Studies for a red-carpet welcome. In particular, I want to thank Karlyn Kohrs Campbell for her enduring generosity and Ronald Greene for reminding me of the power of the sublime. Speaking of helpful and timely prompts, many thanks to Christian Lundberg for bringing me back to the productive stresses of anxiety. My journey in scholarship has been aided in important ways by the influence of Martin Medhurst; his careful and insightful lessons regarding editing and writing over the years mark this writing.

My present academic home, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been supportive and rewarding. On nearly every level and in nearly every way, the faculty, staff, and graduate students have made the completion of this book a joyful adventure, punctuated by numerous occasions to sharpen and challenge my thinking about how to pull it off. Similarly, my previous home at Wake Forest University allowed me to come into contact with several graduate students who graciously endured my wandering talks about the New Negro. I especially thank the students in a seminar in African American rhetoric where we produced pertinent rhetorical biographies of folks like Nella Larsen and Aaron Douglas.

There are two chapters in this book that contain portions of works previously published elsewhere. I thank the University of Alabama Press for allowing the reproduction of parts of a chapter appearing in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life, edited by Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen. I also express appreciation to the University of South Carolina Press for granting the right to replicate in part a work appearing in Queering Public Address, edited by Charles Morris III. A book like this can be imagined as suddenly emerging in a flash of excitement, but in actuality it is manufactured out of the bits of words and documents housed in a number of archives and ordered by folks with seemingly endless patience. I am extremely grateful to the excellent staff at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library; I am especially in debt to the Schomburg Center Scholar-in-Residence Program. I extend a hearty thank you to the archivists of the W. E. B. Du Bois Collection at the University of Massachusetts. And I offer a salute to the dedicated folks at the United States’ Library of Congress.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge two former professors whose investments in me will forever push me toward whatever horizons I wish to bear my signature; I will always be thankful for the tutelage of Thomas B. Farrell and Michael C. Leff.

Introduction

Near the end of the final chapter of Black Reconstruction in America, his groundbreaking study of important sociological and cultural indices related to African American development following the American Civil War, W E. B. Du Bois asked a question that reframed and clarified his motives for producing the work: What is the object of writing the history of Reconstruction?¹ The chapter, The Propaganda of History, was dedicated to a searing critique of how writers, educational institutions, and publishers were aligned with an intense effort to produce an archive made up of new Southern histories; these educational resources, according to Du Bois, were meant to bear authoritative witness to the harm inflicted on the South by the North following the cessation of hostilities in 1865. These publications were circulated widely as documenting historical truth, and they centered on creating a Negro object that could be immediately and unproblematically recognized as ignorant, lazy, dishonest, and irresponsible. Du Bois clearly sensed a wide array of emotions backing the distribution of racist mythologies. The object of writing the history of the new South was not to distribute a putatively legitimate account of stories of human suffering and uplift; rather, Du Bois understood these histories as involved in the projection of fears and fantasies about blackness that triggered the articulation of fields of discourse promising a return to antebellum racial order, stories making pleasant reading for Americans²

The intersection of knowledge production and human emotions like pleasure and pain occupied Du Bois's imagination for much of his long life. As Toni Morrison has shown, the pleasure of writing and reading the American literary tradition is bound up with the Africanist presence,³ understood by Du Bois to register the painful lived experiences of black folk. This conjuncture, then, sparked in him a conviction to manufacture African American artistic and aesthetic practices that could transform these affective sensibilities by telling alternate stories. Perhaps not surprisingly, many African American scholars, journalists, poets, novelists, and painters have been similarly committed to projects designed to remake the race. Indeed, at the writing of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois might have been reflecting on the apparent demise of an exciting art movement that brought together an assemblage of black and white creative agents that he helped launch two decades earlier. Popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance, this convergence of writers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, editors, and graphic artists should be understood as choreographed through the self-consciously pious—but also sometimes vulgar—movements of the trope of the New Negro.⁴

Among the volumes of works of history and literary studies on the New Negro movement, we have seen emerge in recent years assessments that no longer focus on the achievements or failures of creative agents working to produce artistry in diverse forms for the advancement of civil rights, or the production of black national identity, or the promotion of radical Left politics, or the devotion to an emergent black modernist subjectivity in the form of the individual cosmopolitan.⁵ Devotees of the New Negro movement will recognize an important change in regard to these studies: a sliding from judgments of taste, often rendered through statements regarding black artistic propriety, durability, and sustainability, through preoccupations with intransigent aesthetic concepts like originality that structured coordinated efforts among intriguing New Negro characters seeking to dramatize the really new, to explorations into the specific intellectual and ideological labor that was performed by opportunistic and creative configurations of artists and new media.⁶

Hearing the Hurt is motivated by an interest in assessing the pliability and mobility of the trope of the New Negro as it evoked the capacity to bring forth artistic and aesthetic practices and institutions. Tropes of the New Negro bonded together and dissolved social, cultural, and political commitments accompanying emerging forms of black subjectivity and heightened white interest in those subjects, practices, and institutions. In part, my project is consistent with the thinking of Henry Louis Gates Jr. as he understands the New Negro as a semiotic key in a coded system of signs⁷ This work, however, is not neatly framed by an emphasis on semiotics; it recognizes but moves beyond the structural dynamics that are constitutive of investigations into the mechanical processes of signification. Rather than favor explicitly or implicitly dimensions of language at the heart of semiotics, this book foregrounds the rhetorical and aesthetic dynamics of discourse as a field of articulation and movement. Artistic and intellectual works of the New Negro, therefore, are treated as historically contingent places staging struggles amid competing interests regarding the very idea of a New Negro.

Many scholars index the New Negro movement by bracketing it between the Great Migration and the Great Depression.⁸ By these accounts the New Negro movement followed the flood of African Americans into Northern urban centers and was largely drained by the titanic collapse of Wall Street. There is good reason to think so. The New Negro movement required a population of black folk who saw themselves (more or less) as public agents, free to form clubs, newspapers, and magazines. This capacity to do public work on behalf of African America was forged on the killing fields of Europe during the First World War; it was also crystallized under the intense pressures of the Red Summer of 1919, when black folk fought through numerous race riots and were courted by radical Left politics promising an antiracist class-conscious activism.⁹ And so, time was of the essence; clearly the New Negro movement was, in part, a product of a special kairos. David Levering Lewis, however, rightly points to concerted efforts to manufacture the movement.¹⁰ Hence, it is wholly inadequate to attribute this moment in time to the vicissitudes of historical currents, as if the New Negro were suddenly washed ashore. We must treat the New Negro as a kind of artifice. We must attend to the productive forces captured in black artistic practices, making emergent forms of black visibility and sensibility; we must trace how these tropes of blackness get set in motion through (and held hostage by) the complex and contradictory operations of and relations among aesthetic regimes invested in the production of the New Negro.

Since its emergence, the trope of the New Negro has shaped and animated diverse and divergent interpretive acts. As a metaphor, it refracted ways of seeing and knowing, encouraging alternative discursive and material associations and social configurations; it, thus, reveals itself to be an important and conflicted time and place to witness and explore ways of fusing together and pulling apart identifications. The New Negro drew into its gravitational field forms of discourse that could be reinvented and rearticulated as, in essence, not existing before, as the arrival of the unfamiliar that promised rebirth and renewal. The New Negro asserted blackness enveloped in an aura of possibility, sometimes of radical innovation; this was so because as a trope it was capable of performing the sort of masterful transfigurations one witnesses as metaphor morphs into metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.¹¹

We should immediately recognize that the New Negro coordinated tropes of class, sex, gender, and geography. Alternative visions were at the same time new feelings, new soundings, and new sensations.¹² New Negro speech enticed folks with black magic—with the power to conjure, to wake the dead.¹³ The very idea of the New Negro sparked serious disagreements regarding the social and political investments it enabled and the commitments it discouraged; the trope held forth great expectations for and intense sensations of social and political revitalization. Hearing the Hurt dramatizes the fluid and dynamic movements of the New Negro against a conceptual background that brings into relief the trope's resonance and its significance to the constitution of aesthetic experiences that turn a hearer toward the endowment of voice. Hearing the Hurt conceptualizes voice as a unique means for making sense of the intersection of aesthetics, rhetoric, and the lived experiences of New Negro artists and activists working to manage intense political and cultural constraints. Voice refers to a phenomenon that is brought to life through artistic and aesthetic practices that move audiences into a sensual relationship with discourse, impelling a public acknowledgment of the affective and ethical dimensions of speech. As such, voice registers the specific historical predicament of speakers and writers, their forms of speech, and the conditions in which their speech was invented, performed, embraced, or denounced. Voice is our way of encountering diverse performances of the New Negro across time and space.

Hearing the Hurt contributes to the projects on the Harlem Renaissance in literature, American studies, and history by disclosing the manner in which rhetorical studies and aesthetics offer critical protocols for understanding how the attribution of beauty during this era was always already conditioned by the affective and ethical dimensions of tropes of race. Chapter 1 anticipates these requirements by telling an origins tale of the New Negro starring W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. This chapter sets forth key theoretical concepts by coordinating affect, voice, and aesthetics. The chapter reframes the articulations of New Negro invented by Du Bois and Washington as counterparts meant to address virulent racist acts like lynching by animating different racial sentiments and memories. The chapter clarifies what is intended by artistic and aesthetic practices and the aesthetic regimes responsible for their (in)visibility and (in)audibility.

The New Negro movement was composed of a loosely organized and conflicting set of cultural institutions. There were some intensely competitive encounters among aesthetic practices and artistic activities organized by black nation building, literary commercialism, and white desires for a deeply penetrating make-over accomplished by consuming the raw flesh of the New Negro.¹⁴ These competing resources, dreams, and fantasies fed the rhetorical invention, circulation, endowment, and suppression of voices. Hence, the New Negro was a hotly contested rhetorical and aesthetic object, brokering complex and contradictory forms of discourse.

In chapter 2, Of Beauty and Death, I treat Du Bois's collection of essays, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, as a potent intervention in the complex ways in which blackness and whiteness are productive of aesthetic values coordinated by attributions of beauty and ugliness. In this way, I read Darkwater as, in part, an aesthetic treatise concerned with exposing the manner in which the idea of beauty is racialized from within and how it is implicated in justifying social hierarchy. Appearing in 1920, Darkwater showcases the passion of Du Bois's rhetorical imagination as he lays bare the problems New Negro artists and their works encounter while negotiating the complex and contradictory features of Western aesthetics. This chapter explores the metabolism of tropes of race as they undergo energetic mobilization by the Crisis editor at the close of the First World War. Darkwater displays and enacts an artistic practice transfiguring returning black soldiers into New Negroes.

I am doing more than suggesting that Du Bois's project was caught up in producing the kind of political subjects proper to a postwar black national consciousness. Du Bois was keenly sensitive to the opportunity emerging in Harlem and elsewhere for the emergence of a politically viable and autonomous black public. Chapter 3, The Last and Best Gift of Africa, examines Du Bois's attempt to bring a black public into being through the creative exercise of pragmatist aesthetics. Du Bois was introduced to the central tenets of pragmatism while studying under William James at Harvard. Resembling the pragmatist's experimentalism, Du Bois imagines and sutures African communal practices to diverse African American expressive forms by asserting their kinship with tropes of the New Negro; Du Bois's artistic practices allow me to figure a conversation between him and contemporary social theorists like John Dewey regarding the possibilities of shaping a less divisive American polity. In this sense, Du Bois argues that New Negroes offer ways of being and doing that should be seen as vital to an American public.

The power that a black public could muster seemed limitless because Harlem was brimming with racial optimism. The New Negro was alive, animated by some highly charged relations among folks caught up in presumably progressive social thought and inhabiting newly emergent spaces built for acting. The New Negro was an idealized character with tremendous value as an officer in the civil rights movement, as a member of the intelligentsia, as a comrade to the radical Left, and as a consumable body in Harlem's tourism trade. The New Negro movement, with its focus on the high-octane acceleration of the younger generation, was in part a celebration of youth culture. Chapter 4, Negro-Youth Speaks, explores the artistic and aesthetic practices productive of the monumentally influential anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain LeRoy Locke. The chapter illuminates three interrelated movements: the significance of the emergence of Locke as an imprimatur of the New Negro, the unusual network of creative agents and aesthetic regimes made visible through the materiality of the anthology, and the ripple effect on artistic and aesthetic practices the work generated as it was widely circulated and consumed.

It is not improper to think that the New Negro, in part, was the occasion for a religious revival. New Negroes were expected to do the good work of a renaissance and were censured for blasphemy. Being reborn and rededicated to different causes, the New Negro, however, shared a commonplace: to give life. The New Negro sought social equality with whites and strove for equal work and pay; the trope bonded and set in motion discourses of self-determination and separatism, while painting a picture of a meritocracy where the only distinction that mattered was whether one would be anointed an artistic and intellectual genius, one of the artists and iconoclasts of a new generation.

As a mode of rhetorical practice, the movement of tropes of the New Negro can be mapped along fissures marking struggles among competing interests. As such, the New Negro went to the bone and marrow of Harlem's intelligentsia. The acid-dipped satire of the black journalist and novelist George Schuyler, for example, testified on behalf of the density and contested authenticity of the New Negro as an assemblage of tropes key to rhetorical invention and aesthetic practices impacting folks’ work and play. Chapter 5, Lampblacked Anglo-Saxon, focuses on how Schuyler's satire and criticism provoked the staging of the famous debate in the pages of the Nation with the budding poet Langston Hughes. The chapter offers a revised assessment of Schuyler's artistic practices as they were met with judgments rendered through the affective registers of New Negro jubilation.

As a trope dating to (at least) the late nineteenth century, the New Negro projected the dreams of elders. It came equipped with ideas in action. Hence, the New Negro was an exemplar of a peculiarly potent trope of race; it conditioned black folks’ sentiments regarding the good life and how race, class, sex, and region contributed to or blocked its realization. The New Negro had body and motion and followed many ethics. The New Negro strutted the streets of Harlem. The New Negro spoke different languages and dialects; New Negroes spoke the truth and lied; some persons gleefully spoke as a New Negro,¹⁵ and some dedicated tremendous energies railing against the very idea of a New Negro. The aesthetic and artistic practices of the New Negro were products of intersecting networks through which powerful impulses were captured and released in time with felt changes in the aesthetic values of dominant tropes of the New Negro. Chapter 6, All Art is Propaganda, takes up Du Bois's most acute critique of the politics of black aesthetics as he senses that the art movement had lost its civil rights bearings; the chapter confronts the dynamic interaction among the anxiety provoked by the increased publication opportunities provided by white aesthetic regimes, the disagreements among writers, editors, and activists regarding the impact these vigorous actions by aesthetic regimes might have on the visibility of blackness, and Du Bois's speech, Criteria of Negro Art, delivered before an annual meeting of the NAACP in Chicago.

These flows of tropes, materials, and affects can be understood as action-reaction circuits that interrupted ongoing life and made spaces for a new awareness of the world, indeed, made new worlds emerge. They also provided robust feedback to the network of institutions and actors about which practices were favored by whom and why. And this feedback was narrated. It told stories of the experience of a momentarily short-circuited network and what folks did and did not do and why. Complicated emotions clustered in disturbing storm clouds about these transient ruptures, while other breaks gifted folks with games and fun. Chapter 7, Paul's Committed Suicide, takes up the potent pleasures of transgression and subversion of stifling sexual mores and racial conventions in the domiciles of black bohemia. Wallace Thurman's roman à clef novel Infants of the Spring serves as a dramatis for sensing the pressures of New Negro orthodoxy as young artists sought the sort of freedom of expression promised, ironically, by the intense affects registered by the circulation of tropes of the New Negro. The chapter questions the impacts black middle-class propriety and civil rights marching orders have on an emerging black aesthetics.

Tropes of race coagulating within the metabolism of the New Negro did more than coordinate the movement of bodies in line with conflicting powerful interests; they rewarded preferred modes of identification and performance. In chapter 8, You Mean You Don't Want Me ’Rene?, I explore the conjuncture of aesthetic and artistic practices producing Nella Larsen's second novel Passing. I argue that the context of Larsen's artistic work and life figure paradoxical understandings of the very notions of race and sex in the New Negro movement. The chapter ruminates on the impossible opening the novel eventuates as an ongoing challenge to operations of identification. I think it is altogether fitting for the final chapter in this project to dramatize the ridiculousness of closure. It is in this manner that Hearing the Hurt reaches beyond the artificial boundaries of figuring out what the New Negro was really all about.

For now we should note that the New Negro could not be easily written out of existence no matter how hard some folks tried—and some folks tried very hard. This, then, is the story of the life and presumed death of the New Negro as a trope of race and an affective phenomenon endowing voice and imposing voicelessness, radiating in and through a variety of dwelling places. We shall witness the New Negro welcomed as guest and evicted as trespasser. In the end, what we shall see is the fascinating conduction and transduction of a trope of race that still emerges differentially in our voices. We will sense how tropes of race haunt our memories today and can still intermittently jolt us like a raw nerve.

1

Hearing the Hurt

In a lost essay entitled The New Negro, submitted to Century magazine in 1887, W. E. B. Du Bois articulated the cultural mission that he believed was charged to him and his intellectual comrades at Fisk University—a time he later referred to as the Age of Miracles¹—to make a new life for black folk by transforming America.² Thirteen years later, Booker T. Washington published A New Negro for a New Century, a book that accounts black patriotism in the Spanish-American War and asserts the moral and mental development of Southern freedmen. Although more than a decade separates the production of these works, each idea was shaped by the dystopic racial relations choking black communities at the end of the nineteenth century. Each treatise offered education as the chief agency for black advancement for a New Negro. Washington's New Negro contended that, "All education is good, but assuredly that [education] is the best which enables a man to fit in most readily with the conditions of life in which he finds himself.³ One hears the echoes of the recommendation made five years earlier in his Atlanta Exposition Address that Southern black folk ought to cast down your bucket in order to raise a lifeworld out of the blood-stained soil cultivated by slaves.⁴ Given their different lived experiences, these towering figures in African American history drew upon differing topics for inventing their versions of the New Negro; Du Bois's New Negro would be a person of letters, while Washington's creation would prosper through thrift and labor.⁵ Both New Negroes, however, would be fiercely confident of their abilities to forge successful organizations for racial uplift. Washington's New Negro would eschew the Ivy League in favor of the agrarian life, turning black farming into agricultural industry. Meanwhile, Du Bois's New Negro would start an institute of Negro Literature and Art," producing novels and plays constituting black communal values and beliefs.⁶

There are important lessons to learn here about the character of the New Negro as a peculiarly potent and pliable trope utilized in rhetorical, aesthetic, and artistic practices animating discourses of race and figuring notions of the social and the public. These lessons involve more than the conventional narrative of antagonism between the wizard of Tuskegee and the young man soon to emerge as the foremost black intellectual of the twentieth century. This book is concerned, in part, with achieving a better understanding of the compelling character of tropes of the New Negro, how they bonded together political and social commitments and how they dissolved others during the Harlem Renaissance, an era of emerging black collective subjectivity and heightened white interest in black creative expression. This work is also meant to disclose new ways of encountering the stubborn and complex nature of race, identification, and forms of subjectivity and their attendant ethical and affective dimensions. Thus, we would do well to appraise the material and discursive environments of Washington's articulations of a new black subjectivity and recognize their productive relation to Du Bois's rhetoric of a new black consciousness heralding in the New Negro movement. We should first consider the anxiety resonating in the Southern social imaginary due to a keen visibility and sensibility of black bodies following the end of slavery and Reconstruction. Frederick Douglass noted in 1889 that when he was a slave, the Negro was largely outside of the nation's thought, but now his freedom made him discussed at every turn.⁷ This is not to suggest that the institution of slavery failed to attract the nation's attention until it was on the verge of the American Civil War; rather, it is to note that, as property and objects of absolute white authority, black bodies as such were not imagined as posing a national dilemma.⁸ It would take emancipation and Reconstruction for black people to enjoy the sort of freedom of movement and publicity that converted the Negro into a problem.

The difficulty of black visibility is directly related to a question of the proper place for blackness in the American social imaginary. For Southern white nationalists, the end of slavery let loose the black beast, driven by lust for white flesh and tainted with disease.⁹ During the 1880s, the black body became grotesquely hyper-visible and contributed to rhetoric of the Negro problem, a term used to encompass the whole issue of blacks’ place in American life. Indeed, to many of Booker T. Washington's neighbors this problem called for the total erasure of the black presence.¹⁰ And as talk of emigration schemes—voluntary and forced—became louder and as terrorist acts butchering black bodies became more spectacular, blackness emerged in popular culture and media as a new aesthetic artifact made especially for white derision and destruction.¹¹ Racist cartoons, illustrations, advertisements, and short stories appeared in newspapers and magazines like Century, Atlantic Monthly, the Atlanta Constitution, and Harper's Weekly: Editors typically depicted blacks as uncivilized animals and sexual fiends who hated whites and would attack them when least expected—a dangerous enemy in their midst....The weeklies commonly disparaged blacks physically, referring to unpleasant smell, kinky hair, and thick skulls.¹² Blackness had always been experienced and known by white Southerners sensually—as an aesthetic product of the sensorium.¹³ During the 1880s and 1890s, however, a vast array of cultural outlets were involved in the creation and distribution of blackness and the so-called Negro problem as aesthetic artifacts constitutive of an emerging white violent subjectivity.¹⁴

There is more to heed here, therefore, than a deterioration of the meager political power blacks had accrued during Reconstruction; we should sense a transformation in racial affection and sentiment. Uncle Tom grew fangs and became rabid: Coon imagery was everywhere....The distortion was so universal that it went essentially unquestioned among whites.¹⁵ Race relations were gripped by a negative spiral that eventually threatened the very existence of the Tuskegee Institute since Washington's project relied upon the tolerance of Alabamans and their elected officials. Education was increasingly attacked as the chief corrupting influence among blacks, making them hostile to whites. But the South was also trying to emerge in this context as new and modern. The showcasing of industrial and economic maturity underwrote the Cotton States Exposition, and the need to portray a New South that worked peacefully alongside its black neighbors was felt by the planners. Washington was pegged to arrange a Negro exhibit and to deliver an opening day speech.¹⁶ It is in this context that the Atlanta compromise was conceived and performed. Washington sought to stall the negative momentum of race relations by inventing a black subject agreeable to the social conditions of the present and necessary for the economy of tomorrow: The Negro of the future would seek equality of industrial opportunity rather than waste time over questions of social equality. The rising Negro would become indispensable to the economy.¹⁷

Washington's New Negro emerged as an aesthetic artifact that encouraged if not careful handling, then regular maintenance. The sort of white Southern subjectivity to which this artifact appealed was steeped in affects of the past—throwback sentiments of paternalism and domestication.¹⁸ Washington sought to stabilize a desperately deteriorating racial milieu. His speeches and writings mobilized tropes that animated sentiments and affects of a bygone era fondly recalled in Southern racial memory.¹⁹ Washington's New Negro was progressive in the sense that it provided for the agencies of black collective economic development, but it was doggedly regressive in its orientation toward the color line.²⁰ But this observation does not tell the whole story. Often juxtaposed as contra-Washington in contemporary narratives, we should note that Du Bois withheld criticism of Washington for six years following the Atlanta Exposition address in part because he engaged Washington's discourse from the point