The May 1924 issue of The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, adheres to W. E. B. Du Bois's editorial policy of challenging the “spiritual provincialism”Footnote ¹ of American race politics by “seek[ing] wider understanding with the brown and yellow peoples of the world.”Footnote ² It features Valentine Nieting's “Black and White,” an essay written under a pseudonym by Henry Miller, which documents the racial prejudice faced by Indian students who had travelled to the United States in order to improve their educational prospects.Footnote ³ At the heart of the piece lies Nieting's account of his friendship with a young, idealistic Indian student named Tawde, who gradually becomes disillusioned with America as a consequence of its rigid racial hierarchy. In the wake of the Amritsar massacre, in which British troops killed 379 unarmed Indian protestors, Tawde decides to leave the West. Tawde intends to pay for his passage to India by working for a British steamship company, but he is unable to take up his job as a stoker when the captain insists that “no black agitators would stoke coal on [his] ship.”Footnote ⁴ Since Tawde is not actively engaged in anticolonial resistance, it is clear that that his treatment owes much to the racism and antiradicalism that prevailed during the “red summer” of 1919.

For attentive readers of The Crisis, Tawde's story would have resonated with the magazine's sustained attention to Indian nationalism, which included condemnation of the US government's questionable treatment of Indian nationalists based in America.Footnote ⁵ Since Nieting's essay interprets Indian nationalism through the prism of American race politics, it provides a useful starting point for analysis of internationalism in The Crisis, a topic that has yet to receive sustained critical attention. To date, critics have tended to emphasize either the New Negro movement's investment in cultural nationalism or its pan-African focus, drawing a sharp dividing line between nationalism and internationalism.Footnote ⁶The Crisis employed a more complex model: an international frame of reference was central to Du Bois's formulation of African American cultural and political identity, an identity often presented in cultural nationalist terms. To shed light on such dynamics, this essay pursues a formalist reading of the magazine, focussing upon Du Bois's juxtaposition of articles on the pan-African movement; Indian, Egyptian and Irish nationalisms; and American imperialism in Haiti, Mexico and the Philippines. It pays close attention to Du Bois's purposeful juxtaposition of national and international contexts, which involved editorial sequencing of contributions in such a way as to establish a relationship between apparently distinct fragments. Such a reading takes its cue from the magazine's multimedia format, which includes poetry, short fiction, investigative journalism, essays, graduation photos, political cartoons and antilynching campaigns, seizing upon tensions that animate Du Bois's internationalism. It also reveals the persistence of Orientalism that serves to complicate Du Bois's call for collaboration between the “darker races,” which would pave the way for new, transnational political alliances.

Generally speaking, critics have tended to regard nationalism and internationalism as discrete discourses, even defining them as an either/or choice.Footnote ⁷ Analysis of Du Bois's presentation of internationalism and nationalism in the pages of The Crisis demonstrates that there was, in fact, a dynamic relationship between these discourses. In particular, Du Bois drew inspiration from nationalist and anticolonial movements beyond America in order to formulate “interactive, cross-national, and yet still nationalist, resistance formations.”Footnote ⁸

The contrastive structure underpinning such formations is often established through techniques of juxtaposition or stylistic incongruity. Du Bois's orchestration of multiple genres and perspectives has not gone unnoticed by critics. A number of commentators have identified juxtaposition as a characteristic feature of his diverse oeuvre, which spans poetry, fiction, anthropology, history, sociology and journalism. In Next to the Color Line, Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum contend that, at least from the publication of Darkwater, Du Bois employed a “politics of juxtaposition that positions multiple political issues and related world historical movements for social justice as associated, as necessarily juxtaposed, if not fully interlinked, or self-consciously interwoven.”Footnote ⁹ Attention to the interplay between divergent registers and styles, and word and image, has also been central to recent interpretations of the multimedia format of The Crisis, in which poetry, short fiction, investigative journalism and essays jostle with graduation photos, family portraits and political cartoons.Footnote ¹⁰

In one of the most compelling readings of the magazine to date, Anne Carroll notices that “[j]uxtapositions of protest and affirmation were frequent; texts that reported on lynching and violence against African Americans were often placed next to, above, or facing reports of accomplishments and achievements.”Footnote ¹¹ Focussing on Du Bois's careful patterning of contributions to generate discord, Carroll argues that the formal texture of the magazine, with its sudden shifts in tone, “registers the disruption produced by racism.”Footnote ¹² An optimistic narrative of social uplift, which is established through regular features such as the “Men of the Month” column,Footnote ¹³ is disrupted by hard-hitting reports on racial violence (often accompanied by documentary photographic evidence), which force readers to recognize that “acts of violence happen in the midst of – and despite – such accomplishments.”Footnote ¹⁴ Yet Carroll's suggestive interpretation of The Crisis focusses almost exclusively upon interventions in American race politics, overlooking the magazine's consistent attention to “the darker races of the world,” an interest announced both in the magazine's subtitle and in advertising.Footnote ¹⁵

This article seeks to address this critical lacuna by investigating how internationalism is framed in The Crisis. In particular, it examines the tensions that animate Du Bois's quest for “understanding” across cultures, demonstrating not only that an international frame of reference was integral to his formulation of a distinctive version of cultural nationalism, but also that such constructions often drew upon colonialist ways of seeing. The focus of the analysis is Du Bois's sustained engagement with Indian nationalism, and more specifically the Orientalist tropes that emerge in his presentation of the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore, a figure who also received considerable critical attention in such prominent modernist magazines as Harriet Monroe's Poetry. If the discourse of Orientalism has been carefully analysed in relation to Euro-American representational practices, less attention has been given to its influence in African American writing.

Given her interest in Du Bois's careful sequencing of contributions to stage tensions or connections, Anne Carroll's lack of attention to internationalism is rather surprising. It was primarily through his juxtaposition of colonial rhetoric with the realities of colonial oppression that Du Bois challenged the legitimacy of European and American imperialism. In a series of editorials that focus on English colonialism, for example, he contrasts his romantic view of England's “system of Justice,” a view fostered by his schooling in New England, with the brutal realities of colonialism. Notwithstanding his fascination with English culture, Du Bois explains that his faith in England's skill as an “administrator of colored peoples” has been shaken by his conversations with oppressed groups: “I have talked to Indians, to Egyptians, to West and South Africans, and they have left a great, dull doubt in my mind – a feeling of world apprehension.”Footnote ¹⁶ Another editorial, “England, Again,” refuses to make a distinction between England's cultural achievements and a global economic system that perpetuates inequality:

Elsewhere Du Bois sequences editorials about anticolonial resistance, American imperialism and African American protest in such a way as to identify analogous experiences of oppression, a strategy that opens the way for political collaboration. Take, for example, “The World and Us” (June 1922), which brings together brief reports on Haiti, the Philippines and Ireland on a single page. An indictment of Warren Harding's broken promise to end America's occupation of Haiti, which was seen as a capitulation to big business, appears beside an account of the impact of colonial rule in Ireland (“Still Ireland Bleeds”) and a sharp critique of exploitative international companies who inflate the price of coal.Footnote ¹⁸ To grasp the full significance of these reports, readers must make connections and comparisons between them. Read in this way, the economic roots of colonialism become clear.

Rendering visible the unacknowledged role of oppressed peoples in the creation of American and European prosperity, Du Bois identifies comparable experiences of exploitation that could become the basis for new international alliances. While African Americans “wander the world seeking colored companions and hugging them to [themselves] despite their struggles,” Indians, Egyptians and the Irish are united by a “deep distrust of England,” a feeling shared by “the masses of the hurt and disinherited, the world round.”Footnote ¹⁹ As Alys Eve Weinbaum has pointed out, Du Bois formulates an “alternative vision of international black collectivity” that is grounded “in feeling rather than reason.”Footnote ²⁰ Notice, for instance, that he speaks, with some condescension, of “our little brown brothers of the Philippines,” a phrase that at once inscribes a familial and a hierarchical relationship.Footnote ²¹

Recent critical interventions have tended to overlook these ambiguous strategies of affiliation and distancing, presenting Du Bois's efforts to foster an “imagined community” that anticipates Frantz Fanon's “the wretched of the earth” in wholly positive terms. According to David Luis-Brown, for example, Du Bois sets out to assemble an “anticolonial, antiracial political community … in order to dismantle the color line and its discrepancies of citizenship.”Footnote ²² Luis-Brown's reading of the internationalist contours of Du Bois's vision in The Crisis takes as its point of departure “The Pan-African Congresses: The Story of a Growing Movement” (October 1927), an essay that calls for a political alliance between oppressed peoples:

In the image of “entwined rights,” Luis-Brown explains, “the darker peoples … are distinct but also dependent on one another; they gain strength by being bound together, and they weaken if unraveled.”Footnote ²⁴

In imagining a community of oppressed peoples, Du Bois makes an imaginative leap from comparative strategies of juxtaposition and analogy towards the cultivation of international political alliances. Yet his attempt to consolidate a coherent, unifying identity often insists upon a homogeneity that pays insufficient attention to cultural difference. Indeed, it is difficult to read Du Bois's article without mentioning Randolph Bourne's influential essay “Trans-national America” (1916), a contribution to a broader debate among Young American cultural critics about the nation's ethnic composition, which imagines the US as a federation of cultures or coloured “threads”:

In his formulation of internationalism, Du Bois transposes Bourne's ideas to a new context, reinterpreting them in a more politicized form. If Bourne implies that different cultural, racial and national groups should maintain their distinctiveness within a single fabric, Du Bois describes an entanglement of national and global issues, making a case for African American participation in a radical, transnational struggle against racism.

Ultimately, Du Bois seems more concerned with fostering African American cultural identity than with establishing genuine social or political international alliances. Indeed, he assumes that African Americans will be in the vanguard of any international movement for liberation, complaining on behalf of “the millions of our fellows, blood of our blood, and flesh of our flesh, who have not even what we have – the power to complain against monstrous wrong, the power to see and to know the source of our oppression.”Footnote ²⁶ In casting African Americans in the role of “natural” leaders in a worldwide movement for liberation, Du Bois reinscribes the temporal logic of primitivism, which placed so-called “primitive” peoples firmly outside modernity. Hence, his call for “activism along the color line”Footnote ²⁷ is complicated by an elitism that is comparable to his vision of a Talented Tenth in the American context: he assumes that social change will be directed by a “modern,” educated African American elite whose identity is constructed in relation to colonized peoples through such binary oppositions as “primitive” and “modern,” and “backward” and “civilized.”Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, Du Bois's emphasis upon ties of “flesh” and “blood” bolsters a black nationalist identity that leaves little room for an acknowledgement of cultural specificity across diverse national contexts.

In such articles as “The Pan-African Congresses” (October 1927) and “To the World: The Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress” (November 1921), Du Bois describes his vision for transnational collaboration between oppressed peoples, setting out a theory that is presented in general rather than specific terms. When these ideas are worked out in more detail in the pages of The Crisis, however, a number of revealing tensions – between nationalism and internationalism, realism and exoticism, and visionary rhetoric and reality – are introduced. Indeed, Du Bois's internationalist rhetoric is constrained by contradictions that resonate with Brent Hayes Edwards's account of the limitations that often characterize black internationalism, a discourse marked by “unavoidable misapprehensions and misreadings, persistent blindnesses and solipsisms, self-defeating and abortive collaborations.”Footnote ²⁹

For one thing, efforts to foster genuine international political collaboration remain secondary to articles that scrutinize nationalisms across the globe in search of alternative strategies for African American resistance. Contrary to Du Bois's emphasis upon transnational collaboration in his more theoretical contributions to the magazine, his editorials on various nationalisms are primarily concerned with American race politics. Moving from international to national concerns, he adopts a comparative approach in order to formulate more effective modes of African American resistance that are informed by the experiences of oppressed peoples outside America. Analysis of the editorial framing of reports about nationalisms in Egypt, India and Ireland throughout the 1920s and early 1930s demonstrates that this movement from internationalism back to national concerns was a common one in The Crisis. This immediately raises the fraught issue of Du Bois's investment in colonialist ways of seeing, triggering a series of questions about whether his efforts to consolidate African American identity prompted him to downplay cultural specificity in his quest for a unified diasporic “imagined community” led by African Americans.

These editorials are framed in such a way as to establish models for the struggle against racism in America. In “Ireland and India,” for instance, Du Bois compares two strategies for liberation, “armed resistance” and civil disobedience, encouraging his multiethnic, primarily African American audience to pay close attention to the results of such tactics: “It is a marvellously interesting fight and we should watch its every step.”Footnote ³⁰ In August 1923, William S. Nelson points to an important lesson African Americans could learn from Indian nationalists: “whoever has a cause” should find ways “to prove to the world its righteousness.”Footnote ³¹ In a similar vein, Du Bois's regular “Postscript” column in August 1930 urges readers to keep up with developments on the Indian subcontinent: “We trust that the colored people in the United States are watching with bated breath the struggle in India.”Footnote ³² In January 1931, Du Bois's intention to inspire and influence African American protest by way of international examples is made explicit: “The lesson which India is today giving the world and particularly the world of colored peoples, is nothing less than magnificent.”Footnote ³³ Clearly, Du Bois kept a close eye on the anticolonial struggle in India (and to a lesser extent in Egypt and Ireland) partly because it offered an instructive model for African American resistance, with political strategies and models of leadership that might be adapted to the American context.Footnote ³⁴

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how Irish nationalism fits into Du Bois's vision for an international alliance of the oppressed. Along with such commentators as Claude McKay, Hubert Harrison and A. Philip Randolph, Du Bois urges his readers to draw lessons from Irish resistance in the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence. Aware of the fraught relationship between African Americans and Irish Americans, he was at pains to distinguish between an Irish population subjected to sectarian oppression and Irish Americans who “became white,” to borrow Noel Ignatiev's famous phrase, by differentiating themselves from African Americans. Du Bois not only warns that “it is the Oppressed who have continually been used to cow and kill the Oppressed in the interest of the Universal Oppressor,” but he also insists that Irish American racism should not forestall critical reflection upon an Irish liberation movement that took up arms against the British.Footnote ³⁵

After 1916, Du Bois occasionally formulated an anticolonial, antiracist alliance of the oppressed, “the hurt and disinherited,” which draws together a variety of ethnic groups who have experienced social, political and especially economic marginalization.Footnote ³⁶ Even so, this utopian vision, which is rooted in feelings of “sympathy” for all forms of “human oppression,”Footnote ³⁷ is always shadowed by anxiety about Irish American racism; indeed, the “anti-Negro” position of many Irish Americans preoccupied Du Bois whenever he discussed Irish nationalism.Footnote ³⁸ In the final analysis, Du Bois was uncertain about whether to foster racial solidarity between “the darker races of the world,” or to launch a larger international movement that sometimes reached across the colour line. Such tensions animate the pages of The Crisis, not least when Du Bois claims that “the white slums of Dublin represent more bitter depths of human degradation than the black slums of Charleston and New Orleans.”Footnote ³⁹ Even so, critics have often elided Du Bois's intermittent interest in an anticolonial alliance that includes Ireland.

Given such tensions, it comes as no surprise that techniques of juxtaposition play a central role in the formulation of “resistance formations” nourished by internationalism.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is significant, for instance, that Du Bois often employs editorial titles pairing two distinct national contexts: “Russia and India” (October 1929), “Ireland and India” (January 1922) and “Egypt and India” (June 1919) are representative examples. If such comparative insights into racism and colonialism enabled Du Bois to highlight alternative strategies for resistance, they also formed part of a sustained effort to modify perceptions of America, drawing attention to the internal colonization of African Americans. This need to reconstruct dominant European accounts of America is neatly summarized by William S. Nelson in “The American Negro and Foreign Opinion” (August 1923) when he outlines specific proposals to address “the extent of Europe's ignorance or misunderstanding of the race's most vital concerns.”Footnote ⁴¹

In this context, it is intriguing to find that “As Europe Sees Us,” which is centrally concerned with perceptions of America overseas, is followed by “The Outer Pocket,” a column that printed extracts from readers’ correspondence, identifying them according to race, age, gender and geography.Footnote ⁴² An account of plans to send “a commission from the United States to investigate British outrages in Ireland,” reported with a good measure of irony, is published alongside letters from readers in Paris, India, New Mexico, Ohio and Massachusetts.Footnote ⁴³ To some extent, Du Bois's orchestration of readers’ letters strives to shift perceptions of America, or “to solve the problem of letting the world really see us,” as he put it in another editorial.Footnote ⁴⁴ One reader's emotional response to Crisis coverage of a series of lynchings in Tuskegee, for instance, accords with broader efforts to ensure that “America's lynching fame spreads over the world.”Footnote ⁴⁵

At the same time, these letters, which construct an implied audience of international scope, introduce a comparative perspective on racism. The correspondence page, with contributions from an African American girl in Paris and an Indian woman in America, captures in its dynamics a mutual interplay of influences between the “darker races of the world,” which falls into line with Du Bois's wider formulation of national resistance by way of internationalism. Such a flow of ideas across geographical borders is central to a letter from Lila Singh, an Indian woman visiting New York. Not only does Singh praise Du Bois's Darkwater, noting that it has strengthened her resolve to challenge oppression in India; she also describes the consequences of her unexpected encounter with a young African American porter. In this instance, internationalism is figured as both a “common struggle” against oppression across the globe and a means of strengthening resistance in specific national and regional contexts.Footnote ⁴⁶ After this chance meeting on a train, a space that at once symbolizes mobility and segregation, the porter abandons his attachment to “blind hatred”; inspired by Indian resistance to colonial rule, his behaviour is now guided by “definite goals, and definite causes opposing these.”Footnote ⁴⁷

If Du Bois's formulation of an ideal international readership reveals a dynamic relationship between nationalism and internationalism,Footnote ⁴⁸ his efforts to foster collaboration between the “darker races” are also complicated by problematic Orientalist stereotypes that emerge in some of his editorials and articles, stereotypes that are reaffirmed in advertising for beauty products that appeared in The Crisis every month. Some of these tensions are captured in an article about the Nobel Prize-winning poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore, which is characterized by unexpected shifts of direction and strategies of juxtaposition.Footnote ⁴⁹ In many ways, it seems appropriate that such contradictions should cluster around Tagore since he occupied an ambivalent position in relation to nationalism. An early enthusiast for nationalism, Tagore's later distaste for “the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” stemmed from a realization that it promoted conflict, “continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In the context of World War I, he condemned nationalism as inhuman materialism and debased self-interest that had been imposed on India by colonialism. Notwithstanding his sharp critique of political nationalism, Tagore became known in the west as “the Voice of Bengal” because of his cultural nationalism, his “attempt to reclaim local languages and traditions … to retrieve or reinvent images of the homeland untouched by the colonial presence.”Footnote ⁵¹

In October 1929, Du Bois published “A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore,” an article that follows the conventions established in the presentation of similar messages from the likes of Gandhi and Albert Einstein.Footnote ⁵² Tagore's message challenges narrow conceptions of identity that limit individuals to a specific nation or race. In line with his broader critique of what he called “the cult of nationalism,” Tagore contends that “the great fact of this age” is the way the “human races have come out of their enclosures.”Footnote ⁵³ This short letter abounds with images of crossing boundaries or thresholds. In the space of just a few lines, he mentions “bars” giving way, doors bursting open, “enclosures” and “walls” being breached.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such imagery presents international collaboration in positive terms, as a kind of prison break.

Yet the editorial framing of Tagore's generous, pluralistic humanism in The Crisis introduces a number of intriguing tensions. The first thing that readers notice when encountering this article is a haunting photograph of the poet, in which he gazes intently at the viewer. Although unattributed, this image was taken by E. O. Hoppé, a London-based German photographer, who was one of the most famous portrait photographers in the world in the early twentieth century. As Mick Gidley has argued, “Tagore actively contributed to the construction of his own image”: he sought out photographic portrait makers in London, Calcutta and Los Angeles.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such images “worked to augment the fame that Tagore's writing was rapidly acquiring in the world beyond India.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Given this, it seems likely that readers of The Crisis would have recognized Tagore's face. Even so, the photograph serves to complicate Tagore's emphasis upon universalism. As in other Hoppé portraits of Tagore, the photographer presents his subject in such a way as to uphold stereotypical views of Indian mysticism. Ultimately, as Mick Gidley tells us, the photographs “were not ‘impressions’ of the inner man – or, even, exterior views based on intimacy – but the received vision of the time, as seen through Western eyes.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Hoppé's portrait, with its emphasis upon his flowing robes, towering height and august beard, shifts attention from Tagore's anticolonial resistance in his contemporary world (and his position as a renowned writer); his image is stripped of historical specifics and he is cast as a “sage” who embodies a timeless exoticism.

A further level of framing takes place within the article itself. Ironically, Tagore's ideas are presented to readers in a manner that emphasizes his cultural difference. For a start, the message, which is reproduced twice (in Tagore's handwriting and as typed copy), is followed by commentary that attempts to translate Tagore's words for an American audience. From the outset, stress is laid on the strangeness and foreignness of his perspective on race. “Many of our readers will peruse these words with a certain puzzlement,” Du Bois notes. “Here is a man who is colored, who writes with practically nothing of what we are learning to call ‘race consciousness’.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In his message, Tagore sets out to critique ethnic separatism and provincialism, but he is presented as a figure who speaks in “a language which neither white or black Americans can easily understand.”Footnote ⁵⁹ There is, of course, a note of lament that “the artificial limitations of race, color and nation” retain such a firm grip over Americans, but it is difficult to miss the emphasis placed on Tagore's difference, his status as an outsider.Footnote ⁶⁰

Moreover, the conceptual possibilities opened up by Tagore's indictment of narrow racial or national identities are undercut in the second half of the article. Given Du Bois's frequently reiterated interest in cross-national collaboration, one might expect him to scrutinize Tagore's message in detail, not least because it develops a version of universalism that conserves cultural particularity, a theory relevant to the American context. Yet the remainder of the article veers away from this topic; instead, it comprises direct quotation from a speech Tagore gave about the racism he encountered in San Francisco. Describing the “suspicion and incivility” he received from immigration officials, Tagore documents the racism faced by Asians in America.Footnote ⁶¹

Striking effects are produced by the juxtaposition of this narrative with Tagore's message. Evidence of the persistence of racial boundaries in America (which, in this case, coincides with a policing of national borders) reduces the impact of Tagore's celebratory account of a modern age in which various cultures can meet on a global stage, celebrating “that which is universal in the heart of the unique.”Footnote ⁶² Given the persistence of racism, his emphasis on intercultural exchange appears idealistic, if not irrelevant. Ultimately, the article's focus shifts from a global to a local perspective. Having followed the argument's twists and turns, readers are acutely aware of problems that are specific to America; the enduring nature of “race consciousness” undermines any utopianism about international collaboration.

In this article, Tagore serves as a vehicle through which Du Bois reinforces a familiar message, underlining his “persistent opposition” to “the evils of race prejudice” in America.Footnote ⁶³ It is worth comparing such editorial framing with the strategies employed to introduce Tagore in other modernist magazines. A brief survey reveals that a number of American thinkers turned to India, and more specifically to Tagore, as a foil and a model for their own ideas about various topics, including literary celebrity, modern poetry, race relations and the politics of literary activity. In an influential article, Amartya Sen has argued that Western assessments of Tagore have tended to reduce his life and work to hackneyed, two-dimensional stereotypes: “Given the vast range of his creative achievements, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image of Tagore in the West is its narrowness; he is recurrently viewed as ‘the great mystic from the East,’ an image with a putative message for the West.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Attention to the editorial framing of Tagore in modernist magazines exposes a more complicated picture. American writers certainly reiterated stereotypes, but there are also subtle differences in how Tagore's image is constructed in magazines with such divergent agendas as The Masses and Vanity Fair. That said, even those writers, like Du Bois, who vigorously opposed colonialism tended to reinstate Orientalist narratives of cultural exclusivity, defining their cultural and/or political aims in relation to images of the East.

Along with Gandhi, Tagore's career as a poet, lecturer and educationalist generated considerable interest in modernist magazines. Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound's championing of Tagore's writing in the early issues of Poetry established a pattern that can be traced through magazines as diverse as The Crisis and Vanity Fair. When establishing the magazine's editorial stance, Monroe and Pound selected Tagore as the writer who embodied their quest for new poetic voices who might establish “a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In fostering an international audience for Tagore, they incorporated his work into a broader challenge to interpretative conventions that tended to “enshroud” and “swaddle up” poetic expression.Footnote ⁶⁶ More specifically, Tagore was presented as a model for aspiring American poets, not least because he managed, like J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats, to speak across cultures, moving “out of the obscurity of merely local recognition into a position of international importance.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The paratextual material that surrounds Tagore's writings, which includes editorials by Monroe and Pound as well as biographical notes, describes a new, distinctive kind of poetic expression, which offers an invigorating alternative to American provincialism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such mediating frameworks, which set out “to ensure that the text is read properly,” demonstrate that close reading of specific poems is always secondary to the editors’ attempts to influence the future direction of Euro-American poetry.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Monroe explains, “this Hindoo shows us how provincial we are; England and America are little recently annexed corners of the ancient earth, and their poets should peer over sea-walls and race-walls and pride-walls and learn their own littleness and the bigness of the world.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In this context, Tagore's poetry provides a template for the development of “a newly relational, contextual, and often critical” mode of Euro-American poetic expression, which is alive to cultural trends across the globe.Footnote ⁷¹

Alternative versions of Tagore emerge in other magazines, but he is consistently imagined as a model or foil for writers’ elaboration of their own editorial position. There is, for instance, a revealing editorial in The Masses, which evaluates Tagore's best-selling Gitanjali. Notwithstanding Max Eastman's admiration for the collection's delicate lyricism, a critical assessment of Tagore's poetry acts as the starting point for a striking intervention in continuing debates about the relationship between politics and literary activity: “We seek the poet who can redirect the extra-mundane yearnings of all the broken spirits into a reckless will to reconstruct their disappointing world.”Footnote ⁷²

In Vanity Fair, it is Tagore's status as a literary celebrity that receives attention. As Faye Hammill has demonstrated, this was a magazine preoccupied with “the fine distinctions between cultural levels and between different concepts of taste, art, and culture.”Footnote ⁷³ Given Tagore's fluctuating literary reputation, it is hardly surprising that he features in such pieces as “The New Order of Critical Values,” “a sort of logarithm table by which the views of … celebrated authorities [such as Heywood Broun, H. L. Mencken and Paul Rosenfeld] may be ascertained on almost any subject.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The table, which at once mocks and upholds the modern critic's vaunted position as a cultural arbiter, quantifies literary value with excessive precision using decimal points and negative numbers. Readers can compare and contrast critics’ carefully calibrated judgements on subjects as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Homer, Shakespeare and Krazy Kat. With five out of eight negative scores, assessments of Tagore do little to bolster his waning reputation. Taken alongside mention of Tagore in such articles as Tristan Tzara's analysis of German expressionism, however, his appearance contributes to the magazine's sustained attempt to distinguish between highbrow and middlebrow art, making these ideas readily available to the reading public.Footnote ⁷⁵

This table might seem flippant, having little to do with the serious questions of nationalism and internationalism raised in The Crisis. What these articles share, however, is a movement from international issues back to national or local concerns, a recurring pattern that reveals the limitations of American internationalism in these magazines. Indian cultural figures are often cast in a symbolic or metaphoric role; the editors construct their agenda in relation to images of Tagore, and of India. Such logic, which accords with Edward Said's account of how “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” easily slides into familiar narratives of racial exclusivity.Footnote ⁷⁶ Comparison of Du Bois's editorial strategies with those of his contemporaries demonstrates that he relies upon a vocabulary and logic that are complicit in the discursive practices of Orientalism.

With this in mind, let us turn now to another juxtaposition that animates The Crisis: Du Bois's continuing efforts to foster collaboration among the “darker races” frequently collide with his deployment of Orientalist images and tropes. For one thing, he is “indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible,” conventions that pay insufficient attention to cultural specificity.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Du Bois's hands, comparative insights pave the way for new international alliances, but there is little in the way of detailed engagement with India's diverse history and civilization. Take, for instance, “Egypt and India” (June 1919), with its passionate indictment of two notorious examples of British colonial violence that occurred in 1919: first, the Amritsar massacre, and second, the disproportionate force used to quash Egyptian protests against the arrest and exile of the nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul, which cost hundreds of Egyptian men and women their lives.

Given that these incidents soon became archetypal instances of colonial brutality, it is somewhat surprising that Du Bois does not seize the opportunity to elaborate upon his anticolonial, antiracist political programme, laying the ground for collaborative resistance. Instead, he quickly moves from documenting the horrifying realities of colonial violence in his contemporary world to a discussion of the glories of an ancient pan-African civilization. Such a shift, of course, captures the debilitating impact of colonialism. Even so, it is difficult to miss the irony that Du Bois articulates a narrative of cultural decline that echoes arguments of rescue or uplift used by the British to justify colonial rule:

In this passage, a romanticized picture of India and Egypt, tinged with nostalgia, interrupts any serious effort to forge a genuine international political alliance in the present. Du Bois swerves away from a detailed consideration of the difficulties involved in establishing cross-cultural dialogue, challenges that were acknowledged in other contributions to The Crisis, such as Jessie Fauset's searching analysis of the impact of the “shadow of Colonial dominion” upon negotiations at the second Pan-African Congress in 1921.Footnote ⁷⁹ Rather than spelling out a detailed political programme, Du Bois finds refuge in an affective Afrocentric narrative of racial purity rooted in a mythic past, establishing the credentials of an organic pan-African culture that will foster racial pride among African Americans.

Nevertheless, the nostalgic drift of the passage exposes revealing tensions in Du Bois's internationalism. Elsewhere in the magazine Du Bois formulates an anticolonial, antiracist vision that is decidedly inclusive, drawing together “lowly black folk and brown and yellow” and “poor whites who work,” groups united by their subjugation to a global capitalist order.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such collaboration sometimes reaches across the colour line, as when Du Bois calls for solidarity with Ireland's anticolonial struggle.Footnote ⁸¹ Here, however, an essentialist notion of identity resurfaces, in which a global alliance of history's victims, “the Despised and Oppressed,” is not based upon shared experiences of oppression but upon “blood” and family ties. Indeed, the association established between miscegenation and cultural degeneration, mapping as it does a decline from ancient imperial splendour to modern deracination, underlines that a formulation of diasporic identity does not preclude racial essentialism. Du Bois's internationalism bolsters a nourishing narrative of racial continuity. In the final analysis, he seems more concerned with fostering African American cultural identity than with establishing a genuine social or political alliance with Egypt and India.

Equally problematic Orientalist stereotypes emerge in advertising for beauty products that featured in The Crisis every month, images that were not created by Du Bois but serve to reaffirm the magazine's investment in colonialist ways of seeing. Of particular note are adverts for hair grower, bleach cream and face powder for the Kashmir Chemical Company and the East India Toilet Goods Company. As Kathy Peiss has pointed out, Claude A. Barnett, owner of Kashmir, makes reference to Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba in his campaigns for “Nile Queen” cosmetics, but the name ‘Kashmir’ added to the odd, rich mixture by evoking the luxuries of India.”Footnote ⁸² Such images push India and Egypt into a dehistoricized realm, establishing a tension between advertisements that depend upon Orientalist ideas about the exotic, sensual and feminine appeal of the East, and journalism attending to a contemporary political struggle for national independence.

An advertisement that appeared in the magazine several times in 1919 and 1920 encapsulates such tensions (Figure 1). Not only does this image reinforce enduring binaries that divide individuals according to such hierarchies of difference as colonizer and colonized, civilized and primitive (binaries that strain against Du Bois's diasporic vision), but it also constructs a narrative of uplift that runs the risk of displacing the subaltern Other. In the foreground, a dark-skinned girl wearing a sparkling gown gazes into an oval mirror. With her back to the viewer, a naked, dark-skinned servant woman, who can be identified only by her exotic turban, tilts a mirror towards the young girl's face. Towering above these two figures, the portrait of a beautiful, middle-class woman stares directly at the viewer. Given the position of the mirror, it is safe to assume that this image is a reflection, but a process of transformation has occurred. Since the girl's skin is several shades lighter, the changes to her appearance must be attributed to Kashmir's beauty treatment.

Figure 1.

Advertisement for “Nile Queen” cosmetics, The Crisis, November 1919, 364, and June 1920, 264.

This image is particularly interesting because it lays bare tensions that remain unacknowledged by Du Bois in his discussion of internationalism. The motif of ascent becomes a prominent formal and thematic device; a narrative of uplift is signalled through the girl's elevation from primitivism (suggested by flowing bedclothes and exotic foliage) to middle-class respectability.Footnote ⁸³ Even as it dismantles African American exclusion from consumer culture, this advert is implicated in an Orientalist practice of self-fashioning: modern African American selfhood is constructed in opposition to premodern or non-Western subjectivity. Given this, it is significant that the image is composed in such a way as to obscure the “native” servant woman, a strategy that raises vexed questions about the extent to which narratives of racial uplift reinstated racial and cultural hierarchies.

Crouching at the edge of the picture with her back to the viewer, the servant is accorded only a marginal position in the logic of cultural progress that underpins the advert. Yet she serves as a catalyst for the girl's initiation into modern subjectivity; the girl's modern, middle-class identity is imagined in opposition to this shadowy figure's primitivism. Hence the artist relies upon a stereotypical representation of a subaltern Other to naturalize African American participation in a bourgeois consumer culture. If, as Caroline Goeser has claimed, allusions to the Orient provided “the visual foundation for larger social efforts aimed at ensuring meaningful participation for African Americans in the modern American economy,” such images also ran the risk of reinstating representational traditions that relied upon the binary logic of colonialism where one race or people was viewed as fully human while others were regarded as subordinate.Footnote ⁸⁴

In 1919, The Crisis featured an advertisement for Madam C. J. Walker's beauty products, which sought to capture the company's success in striking visual terms. Interestingly, the image draws upon colonialist iconography; it not only includes the strap line “we belt the globe,” but it also features a map of the hemisphere that records the company's progress in various locations through carefully placed pictures of the company logo.Footnote ⁸⁵ Racial uplift, as conceived within Walker's particular brand of enterprise, is envisioned as a colonizing gesture. In this essay, I have paid detailed attention to the dynamic interplay between diverse textual and visual elements of The Crisis – from editorials and adverts to letters pages and photographs – to excavate comparable tensions within Du Bois's internationalism. In his editorials and manifestos, Du Bois calls for “inquiry, association, and activism across the color line,”Footnote ⁸⁶ but this utopian vision of international collaboration is complicated by his reliance upon a vocabulary and logic that remains complicit in the discursive practices of colonialism. In particular, the bourgeois ideals of the NAACP are transposed to the international arena when Du Bois assumes that middle-class, educated African Americans are the “natural” leaders within any international liberation movement. More specifically, analysis of the editorial framing of Indian nationalism within the magazine reveals that Du Bois often conceives of political change in terms of a vindicationist narrative that harnesses exoticist tropes and images. To date, these tensions have often been overlooked in critical accounts of Du Bois's internationalism because critics have tended to focus exclusively upon his editorial pronouncements and essays. An interpretation of The Crisis that attends to the dynamic interplay between word and image within the magazine, as well as exploring connections with contemporary modernist magazines, reveals that his utopian internationalist vision does not preclude a dependence upon a colonialist mindset.