{"id":348,"date":"2009-08-19T00:46:34","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T00:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=348"},"modified":"2013-02-11T18:57:12","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T18:57:12","slug":"portraits-of-the-new-negro-woman-visual-and-literary-culture-in-the-harlem-renaissance-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=348","title":{"rendered":"Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (review)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Legacy<\/a>
\nVolume 26, Number 1<\/a> (2009)
\npages 182-184
\nE-ISSN: 1534-0643
\nPrint ISSN: 0748-4321
\nDOI: 10.1353\/leg.0.0069<\/a><\/p>\n

Martha Jane Nadell<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor
\nBrooklyn College of the City University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson<\/a> opens her provocative and intriguing book, Portraits of the New Negro Woman<\/a><\/em>, with a reading of a painting by Harlem Renaissance<\/a> artist Archibald Motley<\/a>. One of Motley’s many portraits of mixed-race women in a 1928 solo exhibition, A Mulatress<\/em><\/strong>, drew a great deal of attention, even appearing on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue and in reviews of the show. Critics used a language of racial classification, rather than of painterly inquiry, to discuss Motley’s work; they described it and other works in terms of race and primitivism, rather than as meditations on line, color, or composition. Sherrard-Johnson uses the portrait and reactions to it to set up the central concern for her book: the aesthetically and culturally complex representations of the mulatta in the visual and literary work of the Harlem Renaissance. Images of mixed-race women\u2014in novels, films, paintings, and illustrations\u2014engage with racially inflected discourse, evident in interpretations of Motley’s portraits: Mulattas in Sherrard-Johnson’s visual and textual sources are simultaneously proper and primitive, domestic and desirable, civilized and sexual.<\/strong>\u00a0 As such, they are most significantly also a central part of the Harlem Renaissance’s wrestling with race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (review) Legacy Volume 26, Number 1 (2009) pages 182-184 E-ISSN: 1534-0643 Print ISSN: 0748-4321 DOI: 10.1353\/leg.0.0069 Martha Jane Nadell, Associate Professor Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Cherene Sherrard-Johnson opens her provocative and intriguing book, Portraits of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,20],"tags":[52,54,55,53],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-archibald-motley","tag-cherene-sherrard-johnson","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-portraits-of-the-new-negro-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}