Faces of Blackness: The Creation of the New Negro and Négritude Movements in Harlem and Paris

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (8) ◽  
pp. 846-864
Author(s):  
Gamby Diagne Camara
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Cultural Alienation ◽  
The Common

This article explores the cultural and ideological link between the New Negro Movement of Harlem and the Négritude Movement of Paris from 1920s to the 1940s. It examines how the works of African American, Caribbean, and African authors such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sedar Senghor amongst others are, despite their different backgrounds, united by the common themes of racialized oppression, cultural alienation, and pride in their African heritage. The article also addresses social, cultural and theoretical shortcomings of the New Negro and Négritude movements, which have resulted in widespread criticism of theories of Black culture and identity. Lastly, it explains how the values promoted by New Negro and Négritude literarure remain useful in catalyzing social change today.

J. Saunders Redding and the “Surrender” of African American Women's Poetry

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Melissa Girard
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Negro Renaissance ◽  
The Right

J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.

Locke, Alain LeRoy (1885–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Chalk ◽  
Cocoa Williams ◽  
Sarah Fedirka
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Graduate Degrees ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Alain Locke was an American philosopher, editor, and critic whose influence helped to inscribe modernist aesthetics within the history of black artistry, which he defined in philosophical and political as well as artistic terms. His guest editorship of the March 1925 Survey Graphic magazine’s special edition on race, which he titled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" and which he edited and extended to create his anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, is generally considered a seminal moment in the founding of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro includes contributions from what Locke called the rising generation of "Negro Youth" writers, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. Locke's introduction to the volume announced a new age in African American aesthetics, one which abandoned the direct political objectives of racial uplift and dedicated itself to merging folk art with artistic experimentation. Locke was born in Philadelphia, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, and was the first African American Rhodes Scholar. His philosophical theories focused on race relations, cultural relativism, and pluralism, interests he extended to his promotion of writers and artists now associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-244
Author(s):  
Richard A. Courage
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
University Students ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
History Of

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

Douglas, Aaron (1899–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Tribal Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist and educator often referred to as the father of "Black Art." He was a leading figure of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas is best known for his work of the 1920s and 1930s, which featured abstracted silhouettes combined with African tribal art and ancient Egyptian profile heads. European artists like Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso had been influenced by African tribal art for decades, but Douglas was among the first African American artists to blend African art with modern abstraction. Douglas produced illustrations for such magazines as The Crisis, Survey Graphic and Opportunity along with co-founding the short-lived Fire!! A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. He also illustrated books by several well-known literary figures, including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He is recognized for several public murals, including the Birth o’ the Blues at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Evolution of Negro Dance at the Harlem YMCA, and Aspects of Negro Life at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. As a professor of fine art Douglas encouraged generations of African American artists to create their own modern Black aesthetic.

The Sound and Fury of a Renaissance

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-71
Author(s):  
Imani Perry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War I ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
Cultural Communities

This chapter describes the New Negro Movement that flourished following World War I. In the context of the rise of political organizations like the NAACP, Garveyism, in addition to vibrant arts and cultural communities, and print culture, Lift Every Voice and Sing became both an inspiration and a touchpoint for the expression and expansion of African American identity.

Modern Negro Art

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
New Negro ◽  
African American Art ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
American Artists ◽  
American Society ◽  
African American Artists

Modern Negro Art by James A. Porter (1905–1970) is a ground-breaking historical study of African American art from slavery to the early 20th century. The first major text of its kind following Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), it was the main source of information on African American artists until comparable historical surveys were published in the 1970s. The book presents an overview of artists’ biographies with analysis of the style and subject matter of their work. The chapter "The New Negro Movement" lays out Porter’s main argument against Locke’s well-established racialist position. Locke advocated for the development of a "Negro art’ that would counter negative stereotypes and present a more appealing image of the New Negro to American society. Countering Locke, Porter argued that seeking to "exploit the ‘racial concept’" limited the potential expression of African American artists. Instead he advocated for a treatment of African American art as already integral to the history of American art. Rejecting Locke’s emphasis on an African ancestral heritage, Porter demonstrated the historical development of African American art in North America from slavery to the early 20th century. His research and thorough attention to overlooked African American artists remain the book’s most vital contributions to the field of art history, and accounts for the book’s continuing impact.

Circling the Boundaries of the Tradition

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Guirdex Massé
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Peculiar Case

This chapter is not so much concerned with reviewing, assessing, or critically analyzing the body of Yerby’s work, as it is with delineating the writer’s relationship to these major literary moments that have characterized the black literary tradition at the midpoint of the twentieth century. To simply dismiss Frank Yerby as a peculiar case in African American writing is to miscalculate how significant turns in his literary career reflected dominant movements and trends, as well as formal and thematic innovations and limitations that have characterized the trajectory of African American literature from the early 1930s to the 1940s. This period ranges from the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement to an era of social realism in African American fiction.

Langston Hughes: Fringe Modernism, Identity and Defying the Interrogator Witch-Hunter

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-179
Author(s):  
YOMNA SABER
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Children's Stories

Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.

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