| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity. By Caroline Goeser. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xvi, 360 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1466-4.)

The New Negro movement, what today we remember as the Harlem Renaissance, was the bourgeoning of a new black consciousness that was in equal parts sociological and aesthetic. Much has been written about both, though the relationship, the interstitial connections between the sociological and the aesthetic is often more assumed than explored or examined. Picturing the New Negro is a small but important step toward interrogating the emergence of what might be called a black modern aesthetic as it implicated and was implicated by a host of interracial associations "that animated the Harlem Renaissance illustrated print culture" (p. vii). Central to Caroline Goeser's argument is her adaptation of Walter Benjamin's concept of "translation" as a way of demonstrating how illustrations functioned as a modern medium to enable complex, double-voiced narratives that simultaneously illustrated the texts to which they were attached and "created evocative images that pointed to larger issues outside of any given text" (p. ix).

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