The Future of the American Race: Reproducing the Racialized Nation in Print Media, 1925-1940

Between the two World Wars, four artists created works in print media that represented women in sexualized situations: James VanDerZee's photomontage of a newlywed Harlem couple, Future Expectations (1926); Gerald Brockhurst's etched depiction of a nude young woman, Adolescence (1932); Frank Van Sloun's series of etchings depicting lesbian couples (1930-1932); and Ernest Crichlow's lithograph of an interracial couple, Lovers (1938). In four close readings, I demonstrate that these artists' interpretations of their subjects, and the reception of their works, participated in contemporary discourses of racial and national identity that posited women's reproductive choices as critical to the future of American society. Cultural decline was thought to be visible in individual bodies. The belief that society's decline could be reversed by an attention to the physical well-being of its citizens resulted in the development of eugenics, a "science" of controlled breeding that was symptomatic of a racialized notion of identity. The term "race" was used freely to signify not just the color of one's skin but also nationality, linguistic group, and even gender. In all cases, the concept of "race" denoted biological determinism, so that racial difference was understood as insurmountable biological difference. Eugenics operated in positive and negative modes, encouraging some to reproduce while actively discouraging others. Representations of women's bodies implicitly questioned whether, how, and with whom they chose to procreate, because their reproductive choices had direct implications for American society. In my chapters, I develop an historicized analysis of how each artist manipulated the formal qualities of their media alongside iconographic and compositional choices to create works of art that responded to, embraced, and challenged the relationship between race, nation, and reproduction. Including artists from a variety of racial and national backgrounds, I suggest that the diverse works they produced can only be fully understood when interpreted through the lens of racial-national identity, revealing the hegemonic nature of these discourses during the interwar years.