Old Plantation Chic

During the American fin-de-siècle, the old plantation was in vogue. Beginning with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880), plantation folklore was a staple of popular American literature, and circulated by major Northern publishers in mass-market magazines and literary books. Historians have debated the meaning of plantation folklore in terms of the racial politics of national reconciliation and the dynamics of racial appropriation: its idyllic depiction of racial slavery absolved the South of wrongdoing in the Civil War; and its renderings of “negro” speech and thought made for a stock of racist caricature and a store of black cultural memory. But these debates have overlooked the purposefully modern designs that illustrated their pages and decorated their covers. Decorated in styles that referenced Parisian commercial poster art and the art nouveau, plantation folklore was designed to be chic.

This paper argues that the cosmopolitan style of plantation folklore helped Americans remake race as they responded to the cultural transformations of transatlantic modernity. Analyzing editorial correspondence along with the decoration of the books themselves, this paper explains how publishers of plantation folklore used idioms of cosmopolitan commercial design to reconcile popular nostalgia for the racial order of slavery with the pulse of modernism premised on the fluid circulation of culture enabled by globalizing consumer markets. Yet the designs also reflected tensions in the commercial production and marketing of race. For white Southern folklorists and Northern publishers, the modern decoration of plantation folklore mystified its origins in the oppressive social relations of the Jim Crow South. At the same time, African American authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, James D. Corrothers, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois themselves tested in the idioms of cosmopolitan graphic design to style themselves—and the race—as versatile navigators of modernity.