Book Description

My dissertation, "Imagining the 'New' Mulatto: Iconography and Ideology in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance," explores how visual art and culture impacted the imagery, themes and forms of Harlem Renaissance literature. My interdisciplinary study focuses on the writings of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer and the utilization of what I call mulatta iconography within their fiction. Mulatta iconography consists of colorful, visually evocative images which refer to popular culture, film, high art, primitivism and modernism; these images reflect the long tradition of the tragic mulatta figure in nineteenth and turn of the century American and African American literature. By identifying the visual encoding associated with black female representation in Fauset, Larsen and Toomer's novels, I demonstrate how attention to the artistic exchange between visual artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance enables richer scholarly explorations of narrative attempts to dismantle and analyze the black female body as an icon of commodified sexuality. I examine both high art, (paintings and sculpture) and popular art, (magazine covers and film), placing the visual text in dialogue with the written narratives. My comparative analysis of these African American modernist novelists with visual artists Archibald J. Motley, Jr. and William H. Johnson, and films such as Imitation of Life, illustrates how and why mulatto iconography dominated the ideology of uplift and newness which characterized the discourse of the New Negro Movement/Harlem Renaissance, thus situating the mulatto as the quintessential, iconic, representational figure of the time. The body of scholarly criticism arising from Black feminist thought, cultural studies, film theory, art history and literary criticism, informs this study. It is situated within the discourse on artistic movements from the earlier part of the twentieth century: modernism, primitivism and the New Negro movement.