As the United States began to expand imperially beyond the continent, conflicts grew over control of what terms such as “America” and “American” represented—and how to depict them. The so-called “Golden Age of American Imperialism” spawned excited, jingoistic texts that asserted an American identity predicated on exceptionalism and beneficence. Meanwhile, protests arose from, and in, the margins of American literature. Though scholars have rigorously examined the fingerprints left by empire in U.S. culture and literature, we now need to dust for its protestors: the elements and aesthetics of the forces resisting it require further examination. “War in the Margins: Illustrating Anti-Imperialism in American Culture” demonstrates the interplay of grapheme, graphics, and propaganda integral to the anti-imperialist movement in American literature and culture. It argues that hybrid media was essential to anti-imperialist propaganda in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning with Mark Twain's adventure novels and ending with W. E. B. Du Bois's work with the Crisis, “War in the Margins” analyzes intermedia dynamics to highlight how currents of empire play out between aesthetics and imperial politics across and through the page. Each chapter considers intergroup dynamics central to the annexation debates, relying particularly on visual theory, neoformalism, and humor studies, but also attending to book history, especially in the development of imaging technologies. I open by discussing the fluctuating space of home created by narratives in Mark Twain and Daniel Carter Beard's Tom Sawyer Abroad. The second chapter addresses the impact of humor and empathy on intergroup dynamics in Ernest Howard Crosby and Daniel Carter Beard's Captain Jinks, Hero. I move beyond the domestic in my third and fourth chapters. The third examines the use of photography and hybrid media in the battle between Mark Twain and King Leopold II, a conflict exemplified in King Leopold's Soliloquy and its response, An Answer to Mark Twain. The final chapter returns to the United States through the proto-modernist periodical work of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois. I emphasize the ways textual aesthetics articulate national and international dynamics central to conceptions of what it means to be an American, concentrating on the ways aesthetic concerns amplify currents and voices that would ordinarily be marginalized. I contend that a close attention to multimodal aesthetics significantly contributes to discourses surrounding narratives of national and transnational communities and provides a deepened understanding of the struggles surrounding constructions of American citizenry.

The purpose of this dissertation was to elucidate my lived experiences as an HBCU band director as I navigated through tensions within HBCU culture, between HBCU culture and the dominant culture, and issues of inequality, and access. I chronicle my early life and influences to bring clarity and meaning to the choices and decisions made as I transitioned to becoming an HBCU student and then band director at an early age. It was my intention to use autoethnographic self-examination and personal narrative to make transparent racial inequality as it: (a) impacts the academic and musical quality of HBCU band programs, (b) raises questions regarding access to resources, and (c) elicits larger and more complex questions related to race and culture. In addition to a thorough review of my personal recollections and historical artifacts, I also sought to interview as many people as possible that had impacted me, my life, and HBCU bands in order to check my memory and perspectives. As the word got out about my project, hundreds in the HBCU community reached out wanting to participate. Of the eighty-seven persons that agreed to an interview, I was able to interview fifty-two. I analyzed my story through the framework of "Double-Consciousness Theory" as articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois, specifically through the concepts of the veil, the color line, and twoness. The guiding question for my inquiry was: Why is the musicianship of HBCU bands praised by one culture and viewed in a mostly deficit view in another, and how did an HBCU band director navigate these tensions to lead two successful programs? The findings demonstrate that there are multiple and conflicting expectations and perceptions of HBCU band programs. By considering HBCU bands through my own experience of double-consciousness it was possible to amplify the voices of marginalized groups and provide more nuanced understandings to those who have a one-dimensional view of such band programs.

O presente trabalho tem como intuito analisar como a representação visual de afroamericanos foi empregada pela revista The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races, durante sua primeira década de existência (1910-1920), com o objetivo de promover uma nova maneira de apresentar a imagem do negro para a sociedade estadunidense. Este periódico, mecanismo de protesto e propaganda da maior organização para a promoção de direitos civis dos Estados Unidos, a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP), esteve por vinte e quatro anos sob a editoração do intelectual e militante afro-americano William Edward Burghardt Du Bois e foi intrinsicamente influenciada pela forma como seu editor entendia as relações raciais, criando, muitas vezes, impasses e atritos entre ele os demais membros da NAACP. Em uma sociedade em que predominava uma imagem distorcida do afroamericano de forma a denegri-lo, pode-se dizer que a produção visual em The Crisis procurou alterar aquela antiga representação erigindo ideologicamente um senso de autoafirmação. / This study aims to analyze the visual representation of African Americans in the journal The Crisis The Record of Darker Races from 1910-1920, as part of its objective to promote a new way of displaying images of blacks to American society. This journal was the principal organ of the largest organization for the promotion of civil rights in the United States, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For twenty-four years it was edited by the prominent black intellectual and militant William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and was intrinsically influenced by how he understood race relations, often creating friction between him and other members of the NAACP. In a society in which a distorted picture of African Americans prevailed, the visual production in The Crisis sought to alter such representations by ideologically affirming a sense of self-affirmation.

O presente trabalho tem como intuito analisar como a representação visual de afroamericanos foi empregada pela revista The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races, durante sua primeira década de existência (1910-1920), com o objetivo de promover uma nova maneira de apresentar a imagem do negro para a sociedade estadunidense. Este periódico, mecanismo de protesto e propaganda da maior organização para a promoção de direitos civis dos Estados Unidos, a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP), esteve por vinte e quatro anos sob a editoração do intelectual e militante afro-americano William Edward Burghardt Du Bois e foi intrinsicamente influenciada pela forma como seu editor entendia as relações raciais, criando, muitas vezes, impasses e atritos entre ele os demais membros da NAACP. Em uma sociedade em que predominava uma imagem distorcida do afroamericano de forma a denegri-lo, pode-se dizer que a produção visual em The Crisis procurou alterar aquela antiga representação erigindo ideologicamente um senso de autoafirmação. / This study aims to analyze the visual representation of African Americans in the journal The Crisis The Record of Darker Races from 1910-1920, as part of its objective to promote a new way of displaying images of blacks to American society. This journal was the principal organ of the largest organization for the promotion of civil rights in the United States, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For twenty-four years it was edited by the prominent black intellectual and militant William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and was intrinsically influenced by how he understood race relations, often creating friction between him and other members of the NAACP. In a society in which a distorted picture of African Americans prevailed, the visual production in The Crisis sought to alter such representations by ideologically affirming a sense of self-affirmation.

In the 20th century the relationship between African-Americans and Africa grew into a prominent subject in the lives and perspectives of people who claim Africanheritage because almost every facet of American life distinguished people based on skin color. The prevailing discourse of the day said that the way a person looked was deeply to who they were.1 People with dark skin were associated with Africa, and the notion of this connection has survived to this day. Scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante point to cultural retentions as evidence of the enduring connection between African-Americans and Africa, while any person could look to the shade of their skin as an indication of their African origins. In either case, something seems to always hearken back to Africa. However, in this modern world there is a gap between Africans and African Americans: African-Americans have achieved some great milestones in terms of liberty and equality, while many people living on the African continent still suffer poverty, political disenfranchisement, and precluded liberties. African-Americans have made great strides in dealing with these problems at home, but it is clear that they are on the whole better off than their African counterparts. The lectures and writings of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah reveal that the linkages between African-Americans and Africans are political in nature and therefore do not rest solely on connections of culture or color, but on the shared struggle to achieve the unalienable rights guaranteed to all people.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois theorized that black peoples were viewed behind a metaphorical “veil” that consisted of three interrelated aspects: the skin as an indication of African Americans’ difference from their white counterparts, white people’s lack of capacity to see African Americans as Americans, and African Americans’ lack of capacity to see themselves outside of the labels white America has given them. This, according to Du Bois, resulted in the gift and curse of “double consciousness,” the feeling that one’s identity is divided. As African Americans fought for socio-political equality, the reconciliation of these halves became essential in creating a new identity in America by creating a distinct voice in the age of modernity. Intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance began to create new art forms with progressive messages that strove to uplift the race and ultimately lift the veil. William Grant Still (1895–1978), an American composer of African descent, accomplished this goal in his opera Blue Steel (1934) by changing how blackness—defined here as characteristics attributed to and intended to indicate the otherness of people of African or African-American descent—was portrayed on the operatic stage. Still exemplifies what Houston A. Baker called “mastery of form” by presenting double consciousness in the interactions of three characters, Blue Steel, Venable, and Neola, in order to offer a new and complex reading of blackness.