Curating the Volk: Art and the Editorial plateaux in the Mexican and Harlem Editions of the Survey Graphic (1924, 1925)

Jeffrey Belnap, Professor, Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Texas Tech University

This project examines the parallel engagement with the valorization of folkloric cultures of Indigenous and African America in the Mexican and Negro editions of the Survey Graphic, editions published in 1924 and 1925. Although Frank Tannenbaum and Alaine Locke brought contrasting identities to their respective editorial projects, Paul Kellogg called upon on each of them as “outsiders” to assemble and curate a set of texts and images that would provide a certain degree of intellectual coherence to the diverse, sometimes conflict-ridden perspectives that we now see as the formative voices of the Mexican and Harlem Renaissances. This paper attends to the way in which in both volumes, “the folkloric” occupies a midway point between the ethnographic object, on the one hand, and the development of a Fine Art tradition, on the other. Moreover, it aspires to place this high modernist sensibility within the late imperial frame of Global Modernism. The paper’s specific focus will be the performance culture of the Mexican corrido and the Negro spiritual, the folkloric forms that became validated as they migrated through a range of generic contexts.

Frank Tannenbaum’s editing of the Survey Graphic volume subtitled Mexico-A Promise brought together texts by North American fellow travelers and leading Mexican artists, anthropologists and politicians. Tannenbaum placed Katherine Anne Porter’s essay on the corrido (a medieval ballad form that migrated to Mexico with the Conquista) in dialogue with her collaborator Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl)’s theory of the relation between folklore and modernity. Tannenbaum augments this complementary relationship between Porter and Atl with parallel discussions of Mexico’s folkloric regions by Manuel Gamio and the realization of Mexico’s revolutionary future as articulated in an essay by Diego Rivera. Within a few years of the volume’s publication, Rivera would firmly establish his international reputation through the “Corrido of the Revolution,” the epic mural cycle celebrating the triumph of Mexico’s folkloric modernity.

While Mexico-A Promise ratified folkloric performance as a key element of a multi-ethnic, revolutionary state, Alain’s Locke’s analysis of the spiritual articulates a pathway through which the “folk gift” is to be carried “to the altitude of art” (“Negro Youth Speaks.”) Sublimating and extending Albert Barne’s analysis of African art’s relationship to high modernism (“Negro Art in America”), Locke articulates the spiritual’s multi-phased migration from Sorrow Song to a choral symphonic art, a Mahler-esque genre that is to come. Although Locke’s valorization of the classical concert hall as a culmination may seem dated, his multi-scaler analysis of African American folk culture’s relationship to US, Greater American, and Black Atlantic civilization remains vital. Moreover, in placing the cultures of diasporic Africa within a set of large scale, Black Atlantic frames, he became an early theoretician of what we now recognize as the field of Global Modernism.

A study in contrasts: The reception in France of the Survey Graphic ‘Harlem number’ (March 1925) and Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925)

Jemima Louise Hodgkinson, PhD.

Lecturer in French, University of Liverpool, UK

Within the official archives of France’s imperial police we find a pristine copy of the Survey Graphic March 1925 ‘Harlem number’.1 France’s Foreign Minister Aristide Briand had confiscated the magazine and soon alerted his counterparts in the African colonies to its existence, warning that it was ‘entirely devoted to the Negro issue’ that posed an existential threat to France’s mission civilisatrice.2

Altogether different was the reaction among France’s Caribbean elite to Alain Locke’s The New Negro, for which Survey Graphic had provided the ‘nucleus’.3 The Martinican novelist René Maran described The New Negro in 1927 as ‘a monument to the greatest glory of the Negro race’,4 while fellow Martinican Jane Nardal, a Classics student at the Sorbonne, wrote to Locke that same year requesting his permission to translate The New Negro for a Francophone readership ‘quite unaware of what is going on outside of France, and especially beyond the Old World’.5

Drawing from France’s colonial archives and the Black Francophone press, this paper offers new perspectives on both the Survey Graphic ‘Harlem number’ and Locke’s The New Negro by studying the contrasting reactions of France’s colonial authorities and the Black Francophone intelligentsia. It traces the social, political, and cultural ideas contained in these two publications that, on the one hand, stoked the fears of Briand’s government and, on the other, found echoes in influential Francophone periodicals like La Dépêche Africaine and La Revue du Monde Noir. Thus it argues that Survey Graphic and The New Negro widened the ideological rift that pushed colonial France ever closer to the end of empire.

1 Service de Liaison avec les Originaires des Territoires Français d’Outre-mer (SLOTFOM) V 44, Archives nationales d’outre mer, Aix-en-Provence.

2 Briand describes the Survey Graphic March 1925 issue as being ‘entièrement consacré cette fois à la question Nègre’. See letter to André Hesse, Ministre des Colonies, 26 July 1925, SLOTFOM V 44.

3 Paul K. Kellogg, 25 July 1927, Harmon Foundation Records, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 50.

4 ‘[…] un monument dressé à la plus grande gloire de la race nègre.’ René Maran, ‘Le mouvement noir aux États-Unis’, Le Journal du peuple 15 October 1927, p. 3.

5 ‘[…] fort peu au courant en général de ce qui se passe hors de France et surtout hors de Vieux-Monde’. Jane Nardal to Alain Locke, 27 December 1927, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

What is Africa? Recontextualiz-ing Countee Cullen’s Poem, “Heritage”

Whit Frazier Peterson

Lecturer and Research Associate

University of Stuttgart

“What is Africa to me?” asks Countee Cullen in his famous poem, “Heritage,” which first

appeared in 1925 in the special issue of Survey Graphic: “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro,”;

the question haunts not only this magazine issue, but also the anthology it inspired, Alain

Locke’s The New Negro (1925), and it is a question which Black American authors have wrestled

with ever since. Cullen’s poem has been widely studied, but not much work has been done on its

placement in this special issue of Survey Graphic, especially considering the fact that it directly

follows Alain Locke’s article, “The Art of the Ancestors.” Clearly there is a dialogue going on

between the authors featured in this magazine about African art, African American art, and the

transnational relationship between the two. Thus, I will read both this special issue of Survey

Graphic as well as The New Negro within the context of Cullen’s question: “What is Africa to

me?” in order to better understand how various Harlem Renaissance authors understood this

question. Ultimately, I argue that there is no general consensus to the answer to the question, but

the question itself lays a groundwork for African American arts that future Black writers and

artists would take up.