"Looking at One's Self Through the Eyes of Others": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Shown Michelle Smith

(5.) Du Bois first made this declaration at the Pan-African Association's conference in London in July 1900 (Marable 197; Rampersad 64). He would later repeat this famous statement in The Souls of Black Folk(3).

(6.) Editorials and letters to the editor published in Harper's Weekly in the first years of the twentieth century deem the rape of white women a "new negro crime." In an editorial entitled "The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime," for the 20 June 1903 volume of Harper's Weekly, a writer discusses "the so-called 'new' negro crime, by which is meant the crime against white women" (1050). Similarly, in "Some Fresh Suggestions about the New Negro Crime," in the Harper's Weekly of 23 January 1904, the editor proclaims, "The assault of white women by colored men may fairly be described as the 'new' negro crime" (120). See also letters to the editor from George B. Winton and Mrs. W. H. Felton.

(7.) Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching work is documented in Crusade for Justice, A Red Record, and Southern Horrors. Vron Ware (167-224, 179), Hazel Carby (Reconstructing 115; "'Threshold'"), and Paula Giddings (26) follow Ida B. Wells in assessing lynching as a form of economic terrorism. For additional analyses of Ida B. Wells's radical work, see Bederman.

(8.) Apparently Olivier made these comments first in the British Friend, December 1904.

(9.) In "Some Fresh Suggestions about the New Negro Crime," a Harper's Weekly editor links "the new negro crime" to "the talk of social equality that inflames the negro, unregulated and undisciplined" (121). This same writer also links the disfranchisement of African Americans in Mississippi to the eradication of "the new negro crime" in that state (121). Many whites upheld Mississippi as a case study that demonstrated the imagined link between social equality and "negro criminality," and it is plain how such arguments fueled movements to disfranchise African American men. See also "The New Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime" (1050).

(10.) Coco Fusco also utilizes Gates's theory of Signifyin(g) in her analysis of Lorna Simpson's photographic art (100).

(11.) Sander L. Gilman offers a fascinating comparative analysis of this kind in "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature."

(12.) For a recent analysis of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, see Kaja Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World (207-27).

(13.) Gates' definition of Signifyin(g) is much more complicated, and much more encompassing, than I have described it here. Repetition with a difference and direction by indirection are simply two of the important ways that Signifyin(g) works, according to Gates (51, 63-68, 74-79, 81, 85-86).

(14.) For an analysis of verbal shadow meanings, see Gates (46).

(15.) In his important analysis of The Jazz Singer, Michael Rogin demonstrates how ethnic white identities were Americanized, and further "whitened," through white-black conflict (420).