vi, 63 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In 1927, James Weldon Johnson published God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, a book of poems based on sermons heard in the African American Church. There are eight accompanying illustrations by Aaron Douglas. These images visually interpret the subject matter of the poems in a style that blends Cubism, Orphism, and Art Deco. Douglas depicted all the figures in these images, human and supernatural, in the form of shadow silhouettes, a stylistic practice he continued throughout his artistic career. The shadow is an ancient archetype in human mythology and psychology. This thesis looks at the depiction of shadows in a Jungian context. I explore the possibility that the use of the shadow allows deeper communication between the audience and the image by accessing the collective unconscious. I also examine the shadow as a metaphor for the socio-political oppression of African Americans rampant in the period between the wars. / Committee in Charge: Dr. W. Sherwin Simmons, Chair; Dr. Kate Mondloch; Dr. Karen Ford

This dissertation examines black writers' appropriations of blackface minstrelsy as central to the construction of a New Negro image in the early twentieth century U.S. Examining the work of artists who were both fiction writers and pioneers of the black stage, I argue that blackface, along with other popular, late-nineteenth century performance traditions like the cakewalk and ragtime, plays a surprising and paradoxical role in the self-consciously “new” narratives that come to characterize black cultural production in the first decades of the twentieth century. Rather than rejecting minstrelsy as antithetical to the New Negro project of forging black modernity, the novelists and playwrights I consider in this study—Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson—adapted blackface and other popular performance traditions in order to experiment with narrative and dramatic form. In addition to rethinking the relationship between print and performance as modes of refashioning blackness, my project also charts an alternative genealogy of black cultural production that emphasizes the New Negro Movement as a cultural formation that precedes the Harlem Renaissance and anticipates its concerns.