Perception Quartet Talks: Daniel Stein

On January 23, 2026, the organizing team of the online lecture series Perception Quartet welcomed renowned American studies scholar Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein from the University of Siegen, who is affiliated with our university as a member of the CIMIG advisory board. His lecture on “Periodical Perceptions of Black Life: The Brownies' Book and African American Modernism” introduced the audience to a magazine for 6- to 16-year-olds published by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset in two volumes (1920–1921). The so-called Brownies Book wanted to establish a counter-discourse to the dominant magazine culture through strategically designed combinations of images and text, using it to show African American readers in particular (but not exclusively) how non-white Americans participated in various contexts of everyday life in the modern age. The magazine deliberately countered racist stereotypes by replacing commonly used images and descriptions (e.g., from the entertainment industry or racist publications) with completely different representations. Numerous photographs showed, for example, African American children, adolescents and young adults as successful graduates or people active in the arts. Reports, editorials, and letters to the editor discussed the lack of unbiased representations of the Black US population and also provided reports and images related to non-white populations and their achievements in other parts of the world.
The lecture was followed by a lively discussion which focused, among other things, on viewing habits shaped by the limitations of the imaging technology of the time and on the diversity of text genres in the magazine.