A Sphinx upon the Dnieper: Black Modernism and the Yiddish Translation of Race

This article examines the context and content of the 1936 Soviet Yiddish publication of Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike, which remains to this day the most extensive anthology of African-Diasporic poetry in Yiddish translation. The collection included a critical introduction and translations of nearly one hundred individual poems by twenty-nine poets, both men and women, from across the United States and the Caribbean. This article examines the anthology's position amongst different notions of “the folk” in Soviet Yiddish folkloristics and the relationship of these ideas to Yiddish-language discourse about race and racism, the writings of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Magidoff corresponded, and the Yiddish modernist poetry of Shmuel Halkin, who edited the book series in which the anthology appears. When placed alongside Du Bois's and others’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the appearance of African-American and Caribbean poetry in Yiddish translation shows how a transatlantic Jewish avant-garde interpreted and embedded itself within Soviet-African-American cultural exchange in the interwar years. Magidoff served as a Soviet correspondent for NBC and the Associated Press from 1935. He was accused of espionage and expelled from the USSR in 1948.

Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis, sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.

Darktown Follies (Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1913)

One of the earliest large-scale musical revues to be created and performed by an all-Black cast, Darktown Follies premiered in 1913 at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Darktown Follies exhibited qualities common to minstrel shows of the period with its episodic musical numbers and large group finale. The plot, however, focussed on a romantic storyline between two Black characters, which was rarely seen in minstrel performances. Darktown Follies introduced dances, like Ballin’ the Jack (which would eventually become a popular dance on Broadway) and the Texas Tommy (a predecessor of the lindy hop) to the New York stage. Darktown Follies helped launch a trend of White artists traveling to Harlem in search of new material for their own productions. The show foreshadowed the development Black musicals like Shuffle Along (1921) and was an important precursor to the artistic renaissance that would define Black modernism in Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s.

Tracking Faulkner in the Paths of Black Modernism

This essay tracks the relationship between Faulkner’s career and the development of modern African American literature. It shows how the development of black modernism created a new environment for his work, for his work’s reception, and ultimately for his literary imagination—as well as how black writers responded to his work. Faulkner’s approach to fiction developed out of many of the same intellectual cross-currents that gave rise to interest in African American writing, and the shift in his use of black characters in the 1940s registers his awareness of black-authored fiction and his anger over American racism in the midst of World War II. Finally, the essay addresses his problematic response to the Civil Rights movement in relationship to critiques of white southerners’ “tragic misconceptions of time” by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Toni Morrison.