Beauty Along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis Russ Castronovo

1 2 1 . 5 ] Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis russ castronovo In memory of Nellie McKay N AESTHETIC THEORY AND crITICISM, THE NeGRO HAS NOT YET “ made any worth-while contribution,” announced the Crisis of ISeptember 1924 (Braithwaite 207). This statement ignored the history of the Crisis itself, which almost from its inception had ex- amined the status of the beautiful in relation to social justice. With columns like “Music and Art,” which often ran side by side with a section titled “Lynching,” the Crisis staged monthly confrontations between aesthetics and black print culture. The inclusion of artwork and news about black artistic achievements no doubt worked to em- bellish a journal that chronicled and fought against black victimiza- tion. The effects worked the other way, too: with each issue, aesthetics was retheorized so that beauty no longer appeared as an ideal beyond practical purpose but was instead revealed as a formal matter satu- rated by the historical content of racial atrocity. At a time when some black intellectuals found safe harbor in the doctrine of art for art’s sake, the Crisis as an agent of black print culture pushed a confronta- tional aesthetics that revalued traditional categories of the beautiful. W. E. B. DuBois sought to correct for deficiencies in aesthetic theory and criticism by inviting Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, and other prominent figures in publishing to participate in a forum about RUSS CASTRONOVO is Jean Wall Ben- race and aesthetics. Dissatisfied with the responses he received, Du- nett Professor of English and American Bois took matters into his own hands, using the Crisis to develop an Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. This article is drawn from his uncompromising aesthetic theory. The result—his 1926 provocation forthcoming book, Beautiful Democracy: entitled “Criteria of Negro Art”—culminates in the equation of art to a Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Cul- political tool, famously defining art as propaganda. To observers at the ture (U of Chicago P, 2007). time, such as Claude McKay, who wrote DuBois that “nowhere in your [ © 2006 by the modern language association of america ] 1443 1444 Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis [ PMLA writings do you reveal any comprehension of of unassailable tradition, “art,” a much more esthetics and therefore you are not competent ductile category, does not abide prescribed nor qualified to pass judgment upon any work judgments and instead contests the universal- of art,” the editor of the Crisis had approached ity of such judgments. art using the subtlety of an ideological jack- DuBois was led to these rather fine and hammer (DuBois, Correspondence 375). To orthographic distinctions from his work with readers since, DuBois’s prescription has seemed the Crisis that allowed him to experiment with old-fashioned, constrained by a party line of the political uses of formalism. Starting with culture that slighted black vernacular expres- his 1926 manifesto and reading in reverse sion in order to demand, as Darwin Turner chronological order every issue of the Crisis puts it, a single “standard for all blacks—at to its first issue in 1910, I have attempted to least for all cultivated blacks” (53). re-create a critical narrative that traces the But when DuBois declared propaganda development of an aesthetic theory among as the criterion of African American art, he African American writers associated with did not insist that art be created in strict ac- the NAACP’s national magazine. Month af- cord to some preexisting cultural orthodoxy. ter month, the Crisis assembled short notices What matters instead is the instrumentality about black achievements in painting, music, of beauty for political confrontation. This ap- and sculpture as evidence of racial uplift. But proach uses aesthetics to redefine propaganda, any smooth tracing out of this narrative is in- which in both DuBois’s day and ours tends to terrupted issue after issue by the ghastly re- be discredited because of its overt ideological porting of lynchings, which make attention to imperatives. As an endeavor “ever bounded by beauty seem misguided at best and frivolous at Truth and Justice,” to use the lofty description worst. Had not James Weldon Johnson already of “Beauty” in the Crisis, aesthetics overhauls written about beauty and racial consciousness propaganda so that it no longer connotes vul- only to end with a renunciation of aesthetics? gar partisanship but rather operates as “the Johnson’s ex–colored man seeks to ennoble one great vehicle of universal understand- black life by expressing “all the joys and sor- ing.” Aesthetics makes propaganda true by rows, the hopes and ambitions, of the Ameri- framing the concept with the history of race can Negro, in classic musical form” (474). As in ways that people, including white people, he collects material from the Deep South, the are compelled to recognize. Beauty is not a ex–colored man is poised to fuse race to aes- matter of perception but an arena for crafting thetic form, implying that African American hegemony. “All Art is propaganda and ever identity, like music, can be arranged—and must be, despite the wailing of the purists,” rearranged—into universally pleasing com- DuBois explains. “I do not care a damn for positions that transcend the provinciality of any art that is not used for propaganda.” And racism. But a spectacle lynching derails his it is high time that black intellectuals develop goal of aesthetic reclamation. Frightened and an aesthetic theory that encourages expropri- ashamed, he boxes up his research and decides ation: “But I do care when propaganda is con- to pass as white, turning his back on art and fined to one side while the other is stripped rejecting his racial heritage. Black life cannot and silent” (“Criteria” 757). This pronounce- be made over into the classic form of “univer- ment seems muddled: how can “all Art” al- sal art” when its content is infused with the ready be propaganda while “any art” has the racialized specifics of murder (472). potential to be propaganda? The answer lies Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex–Colored in the difference between “Art” and “art.” Man suggests the difficulties facing DuBois and Whereas “Art” implies the cultural validation his colleagues at the Crisis as they attempted Russ Castronovo 1 2 1 . 5 ] 1445 to articulate an alternative aesthetics whose other issues—most notably the aestheticized principal criterion centered on propaganda. violence of lynching—enter the frame as well. Johnson’s novel also indicates the ethical diffi- This friction led to DuBois’s experiment with culty that my essay’s association of beauty and propaganda in defiance of colleagues at the lynching poses. DuBois argues for the neces- Crisis who did not feel comfortable with such sity of this disturbing conjunction because of overt politicization. As I ultimately argue, his belief that aesthetics, as a broad endeavor DuBois reacted by pushing his agenda even that includes propaganda, counteracts the more strenuously, trying to wring an activist narrowness of spectacle violence. Surveying methodology out of aesthetic formalism. the early history of this monthly magazine, I uncover an aesthetic theory that locates beauty Aesthetics versus Art at a site of crisis where violence is aestheticized even as aesthetic formalism is linked to social In rearticulating the beautiful, staffers at the transformation. If “literary form itself,” as Crisis walked dangerous ground, trying to re- Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes, “can speak cuperate forms of representation that had done . of the creation and distribution of politi- so much injury to black people. Worse still, cal power” (67), DuBois’s interest in aesthetics they risked their own irrelevance, opening speaks volumes about how specific content— themselves to the accusation that effeminate particularly African American personhood— dabbling in art did little to abate black vic- often fails to meet putatively universal criteria timization. At the forefront of the crusade for that underwrite justice. By attending to form federal antilynching legislation, the Crisis—as in an era of lynching, DuBois rearticulated the the urgency of its name suggested—had little initial delimitations of the beautiful, whose ab- use for racial accommodation. This stance set stract parameters disallowed black lives from it apart from competing African American having merit in both the national sphere and monthly magazines, which owed allegiance international settings of colonization. to Booker T. Washington and routinely at- Although DuBois’s “militant journal- tacked the Crisis.1 At the helm, DuBois stood ism,” according to David Levering Lewis, for nothing less than “reshaping a race’s image clearly follows in the tradition of Frederick of itself, and . serving a resounding notice Douglass’s North Star, the intellectual in- to white people of a New Negro in the mak- heritance linking African Americans to aes- ing” (Lewis 424). Through it all, the belief that thetics seems tenuous if not strained (410). beauty was instrumental to social justice re- Aesthetic philosophy could be downright mained a poignant chord in the writings of hostile, stipulating that general precepts DuBois and other Crisis regulars including about beauty always met their limit in black- Walter White and Fauset. Their principled ness, the Negro, or Africa (Kant 78; Burke stand recruited new subscribers in droves, to 144; Ruskin, Political Economy 122). For a the alarm of the Tuskegee machine: after sell- people that DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk ing out the inaugural issue of 1,000 copies, defined as the “problem” of the twentieth DuBois increased the print run to 2,500 for century (34), the eighteenth-century neolo- the December 1910 issue, and by April 1912 gism aesthetics seemed a long way off.

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