The literary picturesque: Gender, the body, and visual culture in the African -American Renaissance

This dissertation interrogates African American images in early twentieth-century American literary and visual culture. To fashion a "New Negro," scholars attempted to disrupt the perceived dependence of the black artist on the body. James Weldon Johnson's frequently overlooked essays instruct writers to create a less "picturesque," a less embodied perception of blackness to establish "intellectual parity" with other Americans. I use Johnson's critique of dialect as an introductory paradigm for understanding the negotiations writers make of the body, language, and the visual.;Beginning with Nella Larsen's Passing, I argue that Larsen's referencing of "the Rhinelander case," a trial in which a woman disrobed to prove her race, illustrates the violence of the ontological gaze. George Schuyler's satire, Black No More, offers a different "passing" tale in which black bodies cease to exist. Foreshadowing Ellison's Invisible Man, the novel erases the black woman's body to free the male hero to re-invent himself as a political figure.;The first section of the dissertation examines fictional representations of African Americans which confound the visual logic of the corporeal. The second turns from literary to literal performances and explicitly calls attention to black bodies and visual narratives inscribed on them. I contrast Josephine Baker's performances in France to her American appearance in the Ziegfeld Follies. Baker's Follies costume distorts the infamous banana skirt by replacing bananas with anomalous tusks, resulting in a failure to conform to American standards. Baker's commodified body explains her subsequent association with Harlem, in contrast to her rival, Ethel Waters. Baker's reinventions enable her to be "onstage" continually, much like the period known as the "Harlem Renaissance." The final chapter discusses a connoisseur of black bodies, Carl Van Vechten, and the bodies collected in Nigger Heaven and "Photographs of Blacks." Though the desire to promote black arts informs his literary and visual collections, it is his visual collection that succeeds because, paradoxically, the photos resist the reduction to the body that underwrites Nigger Heaven. I conclude by examining a controversial Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition and the nexus of blackness, the body, and Harlem in the figure of President Clinton.