“Black” images, African American identities: Corporate cultural projection in the “songs of my people”

Abstract

By creating a vision of African American progress and success, Songs of My People,1 produced by African American editors, masks for its mass audience the organized agency of white racism. The legitimation of a positive dominant racial narrative embedded in “black” images is the aim of this successful act of “black” cultural projection. The published catalogue and exhibition succeeded because of the images’ broad popular appeal to both African Americans who were relieved to be recognized as artists and art subjects, and to a mainly European American mainstream audience relieved to see African Americans portrayed as non‐threatening to whiteness. Time Warner's sponsorship of Songs of My People was implemented by a professional African American cultural agent whose job it was to provide the funding and infrastructural interface between corporate elites, African American artists, and mass markets for “black” commodities. With the resources made available, that cultural agent transformed the simple project of publishing a book of African American photographs into an expansive multimedia display of global scope that became Time Warner's “black” cultural projection, a means of accomplishing long‐term corporate marketing goals.