The Visuality of Race: The Old Americans and The New Negro in American Art, ca. 1925

American popular and academic discourse of the interwar period was obsessed with race and the means for discerning different racial types. My dissertation investigates the visuality of race, that is, the idea of race as a visible phenomenon by analyzing representations of two different racial types: the Old American and the New Negro. These types were the products of competing racial ideologies and the subjects of major books in 1925, Ales Hrdlicka's The Old Americans and Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation. Hrdlicka was a physical anthropologist and his book was the first comprehensive, illustrated study of the "Old American stock" reputedly descended from the first English colonists and understood to be superior to other races, including other whites of non-Anglo-Saxon heritage. Conversely, The New Negro documented the lives and culture of urban African Americans, whom it praised as the foundation for a New America built on the principles of cultural pluralism developed by cultural anthropologist Franz Boas. Hrdlicka and Locke therefore presented competing ideas about race, culture, and evolution. Significantly, their books were heavily illustrated and also contained competing theories about the visualization of race-each type was identified not only with a distinctive physical appearance but also with a particular style of representation that was meant to express their distinctive qualities. Hrdlicka's book relied upon traditional and picturesque styles of representation to identify his subjects with the past and the sense of a clear evolutionary heritage. In contrast, the illustrations of Locke's book identified his subjects with the present and future through their use of modernist style. By comparing and contrasting the text and illustrations from these books with other contemporary sources, we can better understand how racial difference was made visible and seemingly real through the style, as well as the subject matter, of representation. Among the other images discussed are anthropological photographs, the iconography of Uncle Sam and the Gibson Girl, Doris Ulmann's photographs of Appalachian mountaineers, Grant Wood's paintings of Midwestern Old Americans, Winold Reiss' illustrations for The New Negro, Aaron Douglas' illustrations and murals, and Miguel Covarrubias's drawings of Harlem types.