The modernist collector and black modernity, 1914--1934 (Albert Barnes, Ezra Pound, Alain Locke, Nancy Cunard)

This dissertation defines a field of interwar collecting practices in which the modernist collector occupied a significant position between institutional discourse and the possibility of individual agency. From 1914 to 1934, museums, publishers, and universities—all powerful arbiters of culture since the nineteenth century—underwent dramatic transformations. Particularly in America, the opportunity and felt obligation to represent and authorize black culture found a powerful medium in the collection that offered a framework for the production of new knowledge, even as its provisional authority challenged older, canonical epistemologies. “The Modernist Collector and Black Modernity” studies in their particularity four collectors—Albert Barnes, Ezra Pound, Alain Locke, and Nancy Cunard—who variously attempted to situate black culture as a central concern of modernity. Taken together, these cases produce a rich homology between the collecting of objects and the politics of anthologizing.; In this view, private collecting is not a specialized institution of its own, rather, the collection's epistemological and aesthetic authority consists in the collector's claims to agency. In each collection the assertion of agency is manifested in the profound, if often encrypted, authorial dimension of its organization. This is evident in the arrangement of pieces at the Barnes Foundation, where the collection acts both as the objective basis of Albert Barnes's philosophical method and as an autobiographical memorial of his failure to intervene in American racial discourse. It can also be found in The New Negro anthology, where Alain Locke's attempt to interpret and direct black cultural production is also the site of private sexual concerns. In this interface between institution and individual, formal obligations and politics, objectivity and subjectivity, the modernist collector aspires to the condition of the author-function avant la lettre , yet asserts the intentions of the subject at the very place that Foucault and Barthes had agreed on the author's death. Never promising a liberatory agency, the collector acts on desires already inscribed by the social institutions he or she attempts to shape, seeking thereby to inhabit a signal contradiction in the project of African-American modernism.