American Tropical Modernism: THE AFRICAN DIASPORIC REACHES OF AARON DOUGLAS’S LANDSCAPES

In early twentieth-century art, the representation of tall buildings and urbanity was tantamount to the idea of modernity. Many of Aaron Douglas’s works from the 1920s to the 1940s prioritized such representations in an effort to emphasize African Americans’ participation in American modernist enterprise. However, the compositions in which the natural landscapes predominate should not be viewed as a visual rebuttal of modernism. The artworks function as Black modernist re-presentations that envisage tropicalia as monumental and integral to early twentieth-century Black self-definition. These stylized tropical landscapes call for a more comprehensive understanding of early twentieth-century Black identity. Douglas masterfully re-presents