The radical eye

Abstract

Focusing on Muriel Rukeyser's poem The Book of the Dead, the New York Photo League's collaborative body of work known as the Harlem Document, and the life histories writer Ralph Ellison collected while working for the Federal Writers's Project in Harlem, I chronicle the cultural conversations and working relationships of practitioners of modernist documentary in the 1930's. Scholars in literary and visual studies have begun to acknowledge documentary modernism as a viable category for analysis; my dissertation contributes to that ongoing conversation. My use of archival and understudied sources, including private correspondence, archival photographs, photo-texts in 1930's "picture magazines" Look and Fortune, and Federal Writers' Project life histories held by the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, distinguishes this dissertation from other studies, as does my interdisciplinary approach to the material. By bringing contemporary visual theory to bear on literary texts and by integrating visual sources into my analysis, I build upon existing studies in documentary modernism, allowing us to better understand the complexity of the documentary response of the 1930's, particularly as it relates to the circulation of print and visual culture. Finally, I pay close attention to the representation of the lived experiences of African Americans in 1930's documentary modernism. Using The Book of the Dead, the Harlem Document and Ellison's life histories, I explore how documentary modernism contends with race: rejecting a history of documentary, particularly photography, that relies on an association with evidentiary value to classify, objectify and inscribe negative identities, The Book of the Dead, the Harlem Document and Ellison's life histories contribute to the production, in print, visual, and, ultimately, American culture at large, of a more positive identity for African Americans.