This wide-ranging conversation with Black cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman—occasioned by the twenty-fifth anniversary of her groundbreaking first book, Scenes of Subjection , to be republished this year in an edition by Norton—explores the author's shifting approaches to the visual over time, the limitations and potentialities of the archive for its discontents, and the models she has both turned to and herself invented—most notably the concept of “critical fabulation”—in the ongoing attempt to find ethical modes of engaging African/Diasporic life, thought, and form in an anti-Black world.

In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis , sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.

“Monumental Propaganda” compares the use of monuments by the Soviet Union and supporters of the Southern side in the American Civil War—in particular, the way they claimed ideological territory by proliferating statues of Lenin and Robert E. Lee, respectively. To answer the question of whether an alternative commemorative landscape might be imaginable, the essay turns to The Negro in Virginia (1940), a book devoted to the historical achievements of black citizenry in America. The book's endpapers present an illustrated map of Virginia indicating sites where black Americans played a critical historical, economic, and/or cultural role. In a book that can itself be seen as a kind of counter-monument to those extolling the Lost Cause, the map presents a vision of monuments that might have been.

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson speak with several October editors about afrotropes, recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity. Copeland and Thompson argue that ultimately such forms are transformed and deformed in response to the specific social, political, and institutional conditions that inform the experiences of black people as well as changing perceptions of blackness.

In 1978, in its seventh issue, October published the travel diaries written by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who would go on to become the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, during his two-month sojourn in Russia in 1927–28. They were accompanied by a note from Barr's wife, Margaret Scolari Barr, who had made the documents available, and an introduction written by Jere Abbott, an art historian and former director of the Smith College Museum of Art who had returned to his family's textile business in Maine. Abbott and Barr had made the journey together, traveling from London in October 1927 to Holland and Germany (including a four-day visit to the Bauhaus) and then, on Christmas Day 1927, over the border into Soviet Russia. Abbott, as Margaret Barr had noted, kept his own journal on the trip. Abbott's, if anything, was more detailed and expansive in documenting its author's observations and perceptions of Soviet cultural life at this pivotal moment; and his perspective offers both a complement and counterpoint to Barr's. Russia after the revolution was largely uncharted territory for Anglophone cultural commentary: This, in combination with the two men's deep interest in and knowledge of contemporary art, makes their journals rare documents of the Soviet cultural terrain in the late 1920s. We present Abbott's diaries here, thirty-five years after the publication of Barr's, with thanks to the generous cooperation of the Smith College Museum of Art, where they are now held.