ABSTRACT
The 1996 publication of These “Colored” United States: African American Essays from the 1920s is a welcome addition to the study of the Harlem Renaissance, little magazines, American modernism, and modernity. Edited by Tom Lutz and Susanna Ashton, the book collects and introduces a series of articles, “These ‘Colored’ United States,” that ran from January, 1923 through September, 1926 in The Messenger, one of that era’s most influential little magazines. Perhaps because it was previously uncollected, the series has until now received no scholarly attention-not from historians of the Harlem Renaissance, and not even from the few critics who have written extensively about The Messenger.1 Nevertheless, “ T h e s e ‘Colored’ United States” represents one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most important and sustained readings of national identity, racial geography, and political possibility. The series offers a unique view into the cultural topographies being formulated by one of the most important journals of the 1920s; a historical document of extraordinary expansiveness and reach, “These ‘Colored’ United States” attempts to survey the whole of a nation, to establish its horizon, and to explore the dialectics between individual black experiences and those of a (perhaps putative) national community. Two years prior to Alain Locke’s observation in The New Negro that African Americans were experiencing “ a sudden reorientation of v i e w . . . we have not been watching in the right direction” (4), The Messenger had begun the task of establishing new directions, of asking “where do we fit?”, and of wondering what “ w e ” consist of in “These ‘Colored’ United States.”
