The Hagro Art Hokum Analysis

While they are often thought of in romanticized nostalgic ways, especially by white people, the 1920s and 30s were an incredibly volatile time for race relations in America – mainly as a result of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Stretching from the end of World War I to somewhere around 1937, the Harlem Renaissance was categorized largely by the attempt on part of African American – or “Negro” – artists to reassert themselves “apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other” (Hutchinson, Introduction). Therefore, one of the main issues for people living in the Harlem Renaissance was whether or not there was actually a tangible difference between art made by people of various races. George S. Schuyler’s piece “The Negro Art Hokum” can be seen as a direct response to this question – one that would have been extremely controversial at the time. As Robin Wiegman points out in her essay “Visual Modernity,” “the visible has a long, contested, and highly contradictory role as the primary vehicle for making race “real” in the United States” (21). By locating race mainly within the visible, however, one is able to see everything someone from an African American background makes as inherently different from anything made by a white American. When writing about different types of …show more content…
In the first chapter of his own book, titled “The Black Body,” Young identifies Fanon’s story of being objectified by the young boy on the street shouting “look a Negro” as his most compelling argument on the effect of “the racializing look” (1-2). Furthermore, Young argues that the “similar experiences” shared by various people of colour (i.e. African American people, despite their origins) are all connected through “the misrecognition of individuated bodies as ‘the black body’”