S4E5: Carl Van Vechten

A man with a passion for the dangerous, subversive, and avant-garde; who eschewed the middle brow and loved the urbane and modern. Known in his life not just as a man of taste, but a tastemaker, someone who set the tone for elite cultural society in his lifetime; the white author, critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten became enchanted with the Harlem Renaissance, approached Black cultures as a source of ideas that he could take and exploit, and perpetuated racist stereotypes in his work.

SOURCES:

Bernard, Emily. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White. 0 edition. Yale University Press, 2013.

Holmes, David G. “Cross-Racial Voicing: Carl Van Vechten’s Imagination and the Search for an African American Ethos.” College English 68, no. 3 (2006): 291–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/25472153.

Sanneh, Kelefa. “White Mischief.” The New Yorker, February 17, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/white-mischief-2.

White, Edward. “The Making of an American.” The Paris Review (blog), May 14, 2014. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/14/the-making-of-an-american/.

———. The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. 1st edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Woolner, Cookie. “‘Have We a New Sex Problem Here?’ Black Queer Women in the Early Great Migration.” Process: A Blog for American History (blog), October 24, 2017. http://www.processhistory.org/woolner-black-queer-women/.

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Image via: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/Carl_Van_Vechten.jpg/500px-Carl_Van_Vechten.jpg