Screens, Entryways, and Cabinets in Twentieth-Century Black Visual Discourse
Historically, African Americans have been attuned to the cultures of secrecy and impasse. Before emancipation, enslaved men, women, and children, although physically and socially confined, were the sentient repositories of a wide range of suppressed information (genealogical, proprietary, and criminal) that their legal status prohibited them from publicly disclosing or responding to, either in testimonies or actions. In the years immediately following the abolition of slavery and up to the civil rights era, African Americans had to navigate carefully through mainstream society’s private clubhouses, so-called legal systems, and other clandestine operations for fear of violating long-held confidences and facing the fatal consequences of disclosure. The psychological muzzles and real-life restrictions prompted, in 1895, the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to write, famously, “We wear the mask.” Although conceived and composed with that period’s narrowly typecast black entertainers in mind, Dunbar understood how the theater’s limitations on the spectrum of black emotional expressivity – encapsulated in the metaphor of a grinning, deceptive mask – extended into everyday, cross-racial interactions. Similarly, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (whose phrase “herein lie buried many things” forms part of this essay’s title) in 1903 notably reminded readers that from the perspective of “the Veil” or, rather, the mantle of racial difference and discrimination, one could begin to fathom black spirituality, sorrow, and struggle, past and present. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century – and even encroaching into our own twenty-first-century Facebook moment – Du Bois’s metaphor of living “behind the Veil” and Dunbar’s poetic refrain “We wear the mask” are themes in African American arts and polemics that, rather than operate obliquely as mere literary conventions, touch a deep, resounding core within a modern, African American ethos.
“Herein Lie Buried Many Things: Screens, Entryways, and Cabinets in Twentieth-Century Black Visual Discourse,” in African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond. With Virginia M. Mecklenburg (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012), 12-33.
