The case of Ebony and Topaz: Racial and Sexual Hybridity in Harlem Renaissance IllustrationsPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-09-20 05:12Z by Steven |
The case of Ebony and Topaz: Racial and Sexual Hybridity in Harlem Renaissance Illustrations
American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography
Volume 15, Number 1, (2005)
pages 86-111
E-ISSN: 1548-4238
Print ISSN: 1054-7479
DOI: 10.1353/amp.2005.0006
Caroline Goeser, Assistant Professor of Art History
University of Houston
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| University of Virginia |
Ebony and Topaz was issued once in 1927 as a collection of essays, poetry, and illustrations edited by Charles S. Johnson, the African American editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Though the volume has received little scholarly attention, it articulated the theme of racial hybridity that not only proved an integral component of Harlem Renaissance cultural production but marked the diversity of American modernism between the wars. Significantly, Johnson’s editorial method in Ebony and Topaz, which promised minimal interference and direction, allowed his contributors freedom to broach controversial subjects shunned by the more conservative African American editors of the period, such as W. E. B. DuBois. As a result, Johnson’s compendium resisted limitation to the facile theme of racial uplift and challenged restrictive classifications of racial identity. The most culturally subversive production came from two illustrators of Ebony and Topaz, Charles Cullen and Richard Bruce Nugent. Seemingly benign at first glance, their illustrations interrogated the…
[View some of Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork here.]
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