"Beyond the Veil of the Secret City: New Negro Representation in Washington, D.C., 1919-1935" examines Black Washingtonians' multiple, and often competing, articulations of the New Negro. In addition to addressing the New Negro as a cultural trope that reinforces ideas about black progress, my dissertation also analyzes the term's material manifestation in the nation's capital. My dissertation builds on recent New Negro era scholarship including Chicago's New Negroes (2007) by Davarian Baldwin and Prove It On Me (2012) by Erin Chapman. These studies have conceptually decentered Harlem as the primary site in which New Negro identity flourished. These studies have also foregrounded the significance of black consumerism and leisure to New Negro identity. My study situates Washington, D.C. within this discussion by demonstrating how Black Washington used New Negro ideology as a warrant for social policing, an impetus for remaking literary and theatrical representation; and an economic activist ideology. Utilizing a rich assemblage of archival sources, I examine Black Washington's negotiation of New Negro identity in a 1919 obscenity trial, Edward Christopher Williams' epistolary novel "Letters of Davy Carr" (now published as When Washington Was in Vogue), Georgia Douglas Johnson's play William and Ellen Craft (1935), and the New Negro Alliance's newspaper New Negro Opinion. "Beyond the Veil of the Secret City" ultimately presents the New Negro was more than a literary trope used to combat racist representations. It was the ideological imperative animating Black Washington's ongoing struggle to realize racial progress in the public sphere.

This dissertation is wrapped up in a comparison of book and museum, which raises questions about the visual technology of the printed page itself: a black and white space. Articles and histories on paper production of the nineteenth century stress the necessity of bleaching wood pulp or rags in order to produce “beautiful,” “polished,” “virginal,” “clean” white paper. Bleaching paper to create a normalized, aestheticized whiteness, upon which to craft the cultural capital of the book, largely anticipates the later use of whiteness in the modern art gallery, where whiteness becomes a “neutral” or “objective” or “normal” color upon which to hang visual art or print words. In certain contexts, especially during Reconstruction and later during the Harlem Renaissance, authors saw the black and white contrast of the printed page as a symbol of racial segregation—whiteness and blackness following strictly ordered patterns. This dissertation thus investigates the shifting symbolism of black text on a white visual field between 1880 and 1940. Several of the subjects of my dissertation have been largely overlooked by critics, (Celia Thaxter, Simon Pokagon, Melvin Tolson), although previous studies have examined the way books of modernist poetry become display spaces—the white space of each page like a wall or frame which affords the lyric poem similar attention to modernist visual art, and imitating styles of display made famous by Alfred Stieglitz in his galleries. Poets thus become curators as well as authors. My dissertation expands these studies to include works written before the modernist period (Thaxter and Pokagon), and after it (William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Tolson), as well as analyze alternate material technologies of book production that vastly impact the visual experience of reading. Moreover, I also consider the political reasons for these material changes to the book, including racial representation, so that my work simultaneously explores both the aesthetics and politics of printed text.

<p>This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity, and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between &ldquo;race&rdquo; (in German, <italic>Rasse</italic>) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work &mdash; <italic>Toxi</italic> (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), <italic>Gottes zweite Garnitur</italic> (P. Verhoeven, 1967), <italic>Angst essen Seele auf</italic> (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), <italic>Die Ehe der Maria Braun</italic> (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), <italic>Alles wird gut</italic> (Maccarone, 1998) and <italic>Tal der Ahnungslosen</italic> (Okpako, 2003) &mdash; provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.</p><p>Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add significant new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in the German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for creating coalitions capable of affecting social change.</p> / Dissertation

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