Designing the New Negro: The Color of Late Nineteenth-Century Multimodality

Focusing on the 1900 publication of A New Negro for a New Century, this article examines multimodal design's “social and semiotic history” ( Kress, 2010, p. 46), arguing that multimodality as semiotic potential and design as semiotic performance were both racially charged in the late nineteenth-century United States. By positioning multimodality, and thus designing writing, historically, this essay exposes the racial coding of design. It reveals the challenges posed by multimodal agency for African Americans as well as their concerted efforts to claim multimodality as a rhetorical resource serving the goal of racial uplift. To underscore the color of fin de siècle multimodal design, the article begins by addressing the racial valance of the book as medium, situating A New Negro for a New Century as a communication event within post-Reconstruction print culture, a transitional moment for technology and publication processes. Then, the article turns to the two key modes of image and word, contending that the White dominant culture sought to construe image and word as White resources. At the same time, the African American community fought back by seizing and exercising their modal agency despite overt and covert resistance. This analysis emphasizes that, as a semiotic performance, late nineteenth-century multimodality was neither neutral nor colorless. Instead, design was interpolated with race, suggesting the need to examine digital multimodality through a racial lens. Thus, the article concludes with a three-part heuristic by which the racial dimension of digital multimodality might be made visible.