Image: By Chanara Andrews-Bickers, PhD Student, Department of English, University of Georgia Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (1926), epitomizes the influential relationship between Black art and activism. Young Black artists—with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas among them—rejected the idea that Black art needed to focus on typical notions of racial uplift. While the idea seems harmless, its expectation of Black art—that Black people only be presented in a respectable way that provedtheir humanity—reveals a desire rooted in elitism and the centrality of the white gaze. The young artists of Fire!! set out to create art that Hughes described as “truly racial,” rooted in radical authenticity that recognized and affirmed the value of Black life and experiences without regard for expectations or mass satisfaction. This is cemented at the close of the acknowledgements page. The contributors assert, “We make no eloquent or rhetorical plea. Fire speaks for itself.” Outside of this stated motive, the greatest indication of the magazine’s aim to replace traditional ideas with something truer to life is in the extended metaphor of fire introduced in the magazine’s title. Fire itself is often considered dangerous, destructive, and harmful. Similar sentiments were held about the work of “younger Negro artists” by those who sought to present respectable Black people as one-dimensional and characterized by prim and proper behavior. Those involved in the curation of Fire!! proudly claimed this opinion of them. They created works to destroy limiting ideas of Blackness, to birth a new, unapologetic mode of Black art. Through Fire!!, artists asserted the possibility of a destruction that was constructive. Artists, scholars, and activists today can take cues from the creators of Fire!! and challenge systems that prioritize respectability over authenticity. (Cover art for Fire!! by Aaron Douglas, 1926)
