Great Plains Pragmatist Aaron Douglas and the Art of Social Protest

Authors

Audrey Thompson, University of UtahFollow

Date of this Version

Fall 2000

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 311-22.

Comments

Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Like most of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, its leading visual artist, Aaron Douglas, was not himself a product of Harlem.¹ Although Winold Reiss and Alain Locke were to guide Douglas in the development of his artistic vision once he arrived in Harlem, his early years in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska gave rise to both the communal values and the artistic sense of isolation that were to lead him to Harlem. It was in the black church and in Topeka's "cohesive and politically active" African-American community that Douglas first experienced black solidarity and embraced "the values of education and social uplift."² Many years later, meeting William Dawson, a like-minded black musician, in Kansas City proved to be a "first step" out of artistic and racial isolation.³

Growing up in Kansas, pursuing a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Nebraska, and teaching in Missouri, Aaron Douglas developed the commitment to pressing against the limits of the known that was to shape his artistic vision as a "pioneering Africanist."⁴ His vision partook simultaneously of a sense of political urgency and artistic expansiveness, both referenced to the situation and possibilities of blacks in America. Among the influences on that vision were the writfngs of W. E. B. Du Bois, debates in Topeka's progressive black press, and Douglas's own experiences as a soldier and a laborer.⁵ Together with the "optimism and self-help philosophy" imbibed from the black community in Topeka, Douglas's experiences of racism, racial solidarity, and adventure infused him with an eagerness to play a role in promoting social change.⁶ Under the influence of Win old Reiss and Alain Locke, Douglas was to forge that desire for social change into a bold and liberating artistic vision.

This essay examines the tension between art and politics in Aaron Douglas's art of social protest by framing his project in the terms set by the African-American pragmatism of the era. As George Hutchinson argues, "a large proportion" of those "fighting for black liberation . . . in the first three decades of the twentieth century had been molded by pragmatism and considered themselves pragmatists," although not necessarily "in the strict philosophical sense."⁷ As a general phenomenon, pragmatism represented a rejection of fixed cultural assumptions about the way things had to be; instead, pragmatists sought multiple, new ways of framing meaning. Whereas conventional approaches to knowledge solidified existing assumptions about the nature of reality into a foundation upon which all further knowledge would be built, pragmatists set aside prevailing assumptions about truth. Rather than taking their cue from supposedly universal truths, pragmatists attempted to construct new, emergent knowledge based on both actual conditions and as-yet-to-be-imagined possibilities.

Because they saw all existing forms of knowledge as problematic, African-American pragmatists sought to create the conditions for constructing new knowledge from social experience. Simply trying to persuade whites or blacks-that the racist stereotypes of blacks were untrue would not lead to significant change, for any new racial knowledge explicitly tied to the old "knowledge" would have to "build upon" falsehoods. The solution, therefore, was to shift away from existing frameworks of knowledge by appealing to an altogether different framework. Inducing shifts in perception and experience afforded the opportunity to reorganize social relationships and therefore social possibility. Whether ideational (as in the case of art and literature) or material (as in the case of economic relations), such shifts were to be guided not by reference to timeless standards or absolute truth but by instrumental considerations: by projections as to whether they might promote socially useful change.