The Negro in the New World: The cultural politics of race, nation and empire, 1885--1911

This dissertation focuses on the cultural construction of national identity and its intersection with race in the decades over the turn of the twentieth century. The study emphasizes African Americans' involvement in national cultural institutions and events, from the establishment of the first viable national conservatory of music in New York in 1885 to the formation of the first historically documented and self-conscious community of African American artists in New York City in 1901. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, an historically significant number of African Americans became songwriters, concert artists, and popular stage performers. Abandoning traditional occupational routes to upward mobility, blacks began to identify themselves as artists across divisions of high and popular culture. I argue that these artists shifted the debate over the creation of a distinctively national culture by arguing for the capacity of subaltern cultures to represent the nation, a problem exacerbated by the marginalization of African Americans within national society. These artists attempted to move black subcultural musics into the American mainstream by utilizing black southern themes in order to argue for black cultures as central defining narratives of American identity. Finally, by imagining alternative racial formations in their work, they challenged systems of racial hierarchy in the United States and the importation of this hierarchy into new American territories overseas following the Spanish- and Philippine American Wars.