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There is an elephant in the room of African American modernist historiography. Its presence is the result of blind spots in our methods, our definitions, and our objects of inquiry. This elephant is primitivism-and although artists and writers of the moment expressed their sense of conflict about a celebration of African culture that emphasized its lack of civilization, later scholarship has largely avoided a close examination of its implications, particularly in the visual arts. This is not to say that the problem hasn't been noted. Lowery Stokes Sims, in her catalogue essay for the Studio Museum in Harlem's 2003 exhibition, "The Challenge of the Modern," wrote cogently of African American artists' "seemingly impossible task of addressing the expectations both on the part of the larger white society and within the black community" when it came to negotiating "notions of heritage and the engagement of 'tribal' arts, of primitivism and authenticity, of plastic radicalism and stereotypical caricature" (14). Sims stops short, however, of pointing to specific strategies for so doing among the works in the exhibition, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. My goal in this essay is to offer a case study-of a photograph by James VanDerZee (1886-1983), entitled Identical Twins (Fig. 1)-as an example of how we might critically re-examine our terms of inquiry in order to discover new modes of modernist self-representation during the New Negro Renaissance. In other words, I'd like to propose Identical Twins as a photograph that succeeds in meeting Sims's "challenge of the modern."
To that end, I begin with a straightforward iconographic reading of the photograph-a reading that, while producing a valid interpretation of the image, nonetheless fails to explain it satisfactorily. Choosing to see this failure as one of method rather than despairing of the photograph's ability to communicate, I nuance the process of iconography through interpretive strategies offered by the image itself. First, using Henry Louis Gates's concept of Signifyin(g) as a jumping-offpoint, I recast the photograph's formal strategies as part of an extended African American tradition that relies on polyvocality and its potential for addressing multiple audiences simultaneously. This re-reading transforms the iconographic process into one that reveals multiple meanings for the photograph rather than a single, definitive one. VanDerZee and his sitters use...