Conference Overview

“Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Advent of American Mass Culture, 1890-1930,” will provide an opportunity for leading scholars across many disciplines to present fresh perspectives on African Americans and American mass culture at the dawn of the twentieth century. Addressing topics ranging from popular music to celebrity and organized sports, the conference will highlight the role of blacks as creators, disseminators, and consumers of mass culture at a time when Americans were pioneering modern mass culture.

Because African American culture and depictions of African Americans occupied such a conspicuous place in the new mass culture, African Americans were acutely aware of the power that popular culture exerted on their public identity. Writing against the nation's emerging mass consumer culture, W. E. B. DuBois discerned the dilemma that African Americans faced because their identity as Americans was, in the eyes of the white majority, contingent. Condemned to constantly prove themselves worthy of inclusion in American society, blacks acquired an acute sense “of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.” In this context, how African Americans were depicted in popular culture had profound significance for whites and blacks. In an age of proliferating technologies of mass culture, African Americans faced the prospect that new forms of mass culture would perpetuate and even intensify inherited and demeaning representations of blacks. African Americans, ranging from performer Bert Williams and film maker Oscar Micheaux to W. E. B. Du Bois and the founders of the Black Swan record label, understood that the paramount importance for black identity and cultural expression that blacks gain a toehold in the mass culture of the twentieth century. Only by doing so could they assert fully their humanity and convey their loftiest ambitions.

More than reaffirming the important contributions of African Americans to every major form of American popular culture in the early twentieth century, this conference will draw attention to the common concerns, assumptions, and constraints that would shape both African American culture and modern American popular culture across the twentieth century.