Protest and affirmation: Composite texts in the Crisis

American Literature

Volumn 76, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 89-116

  Carroll, Anne ^a  

^a WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950519592     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-76-1-89     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Studies of the Crisis generally address its written texts, with little discussion of its visual texts or layout; comparisons with other periodicals are rare. For more on Crisis scholarship, see my Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, forthcoming)
2. The board of the NAACP did not necessarily share DuBois's desire to publish a magazine, and it often disagreed with his editorial practices (see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race: 1868-1919 [New York: Henry Holt, 1993], 408-10, 466-500)
3. For a brief overview of the rise of illustrations in newspapers, see W. David Sloan and Lisa Mullikin Parcell, eds., American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), 316-49
4. "A Proposed Negro Journal," in Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 78
5. DuBois, "A Proposed Negro Journal," 78. DuBois was not able to secure funding from this source, the banker Jacob Schiff, but the magazines he launched within the next five years - the Moon, Horizon, and the Crisis - can be seen as different versions of the "Negro journal" he proposed
6. "Promotion of Prejudice," September 1911, 196-97
7. Brief mention of illustrations in the Chicago Defender can be found in T. Ella Strother, "The Race-Advocacy Function of the Black Press," Black American Literature Forum 12 (autumn 1978): 94, 97
8. and Alan D. DeSantis, "A Forgotten Leader: Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago Defender from 1910-1920," Journalism History 23 (summer 1997): 65
9. "The Colored Magazine in America," Crisis, November 1912, 33-34
10. For reprints of illustrations from the Voice of the Negro, see Gates, "The Trope of a New Negro," 140-46
11. DuBois's criticism of the black press led to one of his many clashes with the NAACP board (see Elliott Rudwick, "W. E. B. Du Bois in the Role of Crisis Editor," Journal of Negro History 43 [July 1958]: 220-21). In November 1918, after another clash, DuBois's editorial column in the Crisis was renamed "Opinion of W. E. B. Du Bois," thus making explicit his authorship of these pieces
12. See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 387-89
13. "The Crisis: A Business Proposition," Crisis, February 1911, 3. Calls for photographs were repeated in many of the announcements of forthcoming special issues, especially the issues on children and education, which depended on submissions of photographs and information from readers
14. "Editing the Crisis," Crisis, March 1951
15. and "Early Years of the NAACP and the Urban League, " in Black and White Sat Down Together: Reminiscences of an NAACPFounder, ed. Ralph E. Luker [New York: Feminist Press, 1995], 69)
16. Perhaps, then, Ovington and Maclean took a similar role with the magazine. Maclean was a feature writer for the New York Times who volunteered at the Crisis and worked as its managing editor until her death in 1912 (see Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Vol. 1: 1909-1920 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967], 151)
17. To whatever extent DuBois and others at the Crisis overlooked the significance of layout, they had plenty of company. Studies of periodicals that mention only written texts are more common than those that consider illustrations as well, and discussions of layout are even more rare. On this trend in studies of newspapers, see Kevin G. Barnhurst, Seeing the Newspaper (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), 164
18. For more on these types of composite texts, in literature and the visual arts, see Carmi Weingrod, "Collage, Montage, Assemblage," American Artist 58 (April 1994): 18-19
19. Brigid Doherty offers an extensive discussion of montage as practiced by Dada visual artists in Berlin in the 1910s and 1920s in "See: 'We Are All Neurasthenics!': Or, the Trauma of Dada Montage," Critical Inquiry 24 (autumn 1997): 82-132
20. This attention to the practice of montage in a range of media supports Wettlaufer's argument that "we must expand our vision of montage" ("Ruskin and Laforgue," 533-34)
21. Sergei Eisenstein, "Word and Image," The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (1942; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975), 35
22. Wettlaufer, "Ruskin and Laforgue," 523
23. Lutz P. Koepnick summarizes Benjamin's ideas in "Allegory and Power: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Representation," Soundings 79 (spring-summer 1996): 60, 72-73
24. Gwen Raaberg, "Beyond Fragmentation: Collage as a Feminist Strategy in the Arts," Mosaic 31 (September 1998): 155
25. Jeremy Tambling, "Dangerous Crossings: Dickens, Digression, and Montage," Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 46
26. Pablo Picasso, quoted in John Golding, "Cubism," in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 66
27. Eisenstein, "Word and Image," 7, 9, 10
28. Wettlaufer, "Ruskin and Laforgue," 516
29. For a discussion of the ongoing persecution of the Crisis, see Theodore Kornweibel Jr., "Investigate Everything": Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2002), 132-48
30. and "SeeingRed": Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), 54-75
31. This is a significant consideration, given the rise of sensationalism in journalism in the 1890s and the 1900s. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers are perhaps the most infamous for exaggerating or even fabricating news; see Marvin Olasky, Central Ideas in the Development of American Journalism: A Narrative History (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991), 109-14
32. See "The Looking Glass: The Riot in East St. Louis," Crisis, August 1917,175-78
33. and "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: The Massacre of East St. Louis," Crisis, September 1917, 219-38
34. "The Waco Horror," Crisis, July 1916, Supplement: 2-6
35. See James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000)
36. "The Gall of Bitterness," 153. Even Booker T. Washington added to this perception. Although he condemned lynching,"for many years he was inclined to downplay it, or to suggest it befell mostly vagrants or lowlifes" (Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America [New York: Random House, 2002], viii)
37. The possibility that lynching happened because of African Americans' success is suggested elsewhere in the Crisis; see, for example, Walter White, "The Lynching of Jim McIlherron: An NAACP Investigation," Crisis, May 1918, 17. White discovered that part of the reason for McIlherron's murder was that he was successful enough to drive a "big buggy," which earned him the animosity of his white neighbors
38. "The Burden: Another Southern Idyl," Crisis, March 1913, 246
39. For an analysis of the mix of texts in Johnson, see my "Art, Literature, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Messages of God's Trombones," College Literature 29 (summer 2002): 57-82