Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture

Abstract

Photography on the Color Line Looking back over an extraordinarily long and distinguished career, W. E. B. Du Bois would remember: ''At the beginning of the twentieth century, when I was but ten years out of college, I visited the Paris Exposition of 1900.It was one of the finest, perhaps the very finest, of world expositions. . . .I had brought with me, as excuse for coming, a little display showing the development of Negroes in the United States, which gained a gold medal.'' 1 Despite his somewhat modest account, Du Bois's participation in the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition marked a formative moment in his early intellectual life.The Paris Exposition launched Du Bois into national and international recognition as an African American scholar and a leader in the emerging field of sociology. 2Further, Du Bois introduced one of his ''little displays'' with what would become his most prophetic pronouncement: ''The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.''At the Paris Exposition, Du Bois declared that ''race'' would prove the defining and most fundamental problem of the age, and his own work from that period has shaped critical thinking about race for the past century.Du Bois's predictions about the color line continue to resonate in the current historical moment, but some of the important nuances of his original understanding of the color line have been lost to us over the hundred years since his first articulation.This book aims to recover the visual meanings of the color line, to excavate from Du Bois's initial conception the visual theater of racist projection and inscription, as well as antiracist resistance, which, for Du Bois, structures the process of racial identification.While scholars have productively employed the material meaning of the color line as the marker of social and economic divides engendered by slavery, segregation, colo-