Intellect, Art, Culture: Legacies of The New Negro; A Forum on Jeffrey C. Stewart’s Biography of Alain Locke

Jean Toomer (26 December 1894—30 March 1967) was an American writer associated with literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. He was born as Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., and changed his name to Jean Toomer at the beginning of his writing career in 1920. Toomer is primarily known for his critically acclaimed book Cane (1923), an experimental collage text of narratives, dramatic pieces, and poems. He also published essays, literary reviews and criticism, poems, dramatic texts, and stories in journals and newspapers. Though opposing reductive racial categories, Toomer was in close contact with the New Negro movement, initiated by Alain Locke, while he was working on Cane. Being of multiracial descent, he could easily pass for white, and lived both as black and white at different stages of his life. After the publication of Cane, he rejected all racial classifications. In the early 1920s, Toomer turned toward the spiritual ideas of George Gurdjieff, whose school of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development he followed and taught himself until 1935. In his later life, he became interested in Quakerism. With the exception of a collection of aphorisms, Toomer did not publish any more books after Cane during his lifetime.

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Justifying the Margin: The Construction of “Soul” in Russian and African-American Texts

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2500135 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 51 (4) ◽

pp. 749-757 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Dale E. Peterson

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Free Expression ◽

New Negro ◽

Interesting Fact ◽

Black Arts ◽

Alain Locke ◽

Emancipation Proclamation

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

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Feeling Universality and Thinking Particularistically: Alain Locke, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, and the Harlem Renaissance

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300005123 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 19 ◽

pp. 289-314 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Mark Helbling

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Harlem Renaissance ◽

The South ◽

New Negro ◽

Black Folk ◽

Franz Boas ◽

Howard University ◽

Alain Locke ◽

The World ◽

Younger Generation

In 1925 in The New Negro, Alain Locke announced to the world that something new, “something beyond the watch and guard of statistics,” had taken place in the racial alembic of 20th-century America. Although the “Sociologist,” the “Philanthropist,” and the “Race-leader” were not unaware of this “changeling,” this New Negro, they were unable to account for what they saw. A new awareness was needed, for these authorities were unable to see beyond the limits and assumptions of their professional interests. For this reason, it was Locke's intent, as a professor of philosophy at Howard University, to announce, to identify, and to help bring to life this renaissance of the spirit. Not unlike W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, Locke challenged his generation to see the world with fresh eyes. But, whereas DuBois took his reader to the South, to “historic ground,” Locke looked over the terrain of a “younger generation … vibrant with a new psychology.” Harlem, not Georgia, was the center of his attention. And, unlike DuBois, Locke did not seek to reveal “the strange experience” of being a “problem” but celebrated the pride of being black in America.

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