The New Negro Movement and “Niggerati Manor”

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-164
Keyword(s):  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement

The Center Cannot Hold

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ewing
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
The First World War ◽  
New Theater

This chapter explores racial politics during the First World War, which acted as a catalyst in which old and richly drawn contests of authority and power were shifted on their axis, disrupted, and transformed. From the ascendant black capital of Harlem, a militant “New Negro” movement had emerged, its proponents hoping to more dramatically leverage the “new theater” created by the war to reshape global relations of race and class inequality, to celebrate militant and respectable black masculinity, and to replace an old cadre of elitist and ineffectual black leadership with a new brand of uncompromising mass politics. Joining the stream of West Indians heading for New York, Marcus Garvey was a fortunate witness to the birth of the New Negro movement. By the end of the war, thoughts of returning to Jamaica forgotten, he had begun to pull the movement's center of gravity toward himself and his organization.

Enter the “New Crowd” Journalists

Race News ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Marcus Garvey ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
News Events

The militant racial politics of the alternative black press and modernist sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance seeped into the commercial black press in the 1920s as journalists reprinted and debated editorials, covered news events, and nurtured diverse professional relationships. The radical editors of the New Negro Movement – including Cyril Briggs, Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph – denounced capitalism and imperialism and promoted Pan-Africanism. Commercial newspapers normalized literary writers' modernist perspective by serving as an arena for contesting the conservative politics of respectability, as illustrated by George Schuyler’s columns. Many publishers reinforced this change in newswriting by shifting to tabloid sensationalism, the era's defining journalistic mode.

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.

Jean Toomer (1894—1967)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Knewitz
Keyword(s):  
Close Contact ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
Self Development

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.

West Africa and the African Diaspora

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bayo Holsey
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
African Countries ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
African Identity ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Ongoing Dialogue

West Africa and the African diaspora share an intertwined history. From the earliest moments of the development of the diaspora, West Africans and members of the African diaspora have sought ways to connect to each other. They have done so through the exploration of cultural links, travel back and forth between West Africa and the diaspora, and the development of shared philosophical and political movements. They have celebrated the idea of a collective “African” identity shaped by people on both sides of the Atlantic including the Pan-African Movement, the New Negro Movement, and Negritude. The late 20th century has seen the travel of diasporic subjects to West African countries including Ghana, the Gambia, and Senegal, which have fashioned themselves as African homelands. Artists, activists, and migrants continue to travel back and forth between West Africa and various points in the African diaspora and, in doing so, shape the contours of the Black Atlantic World. The continuous communication and contact between West Africa and the diaspora constitute an ongoing dialogue that has led to cultural innovations on both sides of the Atlantic.

scholarly journals ‘Watching the Waters’: Tropic flows in the Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and other currents

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jak Peake
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Dominant Term ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

The ‘Harlem Renaissance’ is now a dominant term for what is commonly used to describe a cultural movement that emerged between the First and Second World Wars. The term became the hegemonic around the early 1970s, displacing similar, yet distinct, alternatives including the New Negro, the New Negro movement and the Negro/Black Renaissance. This essay traces a genealogy of such terms, metanarratives and historiographical currents. The aim here is to demonstrate how the hegemony of the term Harlem Renaissance is linked to its institutionalization as a subject and the rise of Black studies in the United States. The weighting of Harlem as a geographical reference point both localized and nationalized the subject area which resulted in a selective historiography and diminished the transnational dimensions of the New Negro and the Negro Renaissance. The framework is trans-American and the scope transnational, while the chronology covers an inner 1890s–1940s period, and a broad outer period which begins in 1701 and spans post-WWII writing. In marking these flows, this essay problematizes the notion of distinct political or cultural channels of the ‘movement’ or ‘movements’. Recent scholarship attentive to some of the limitations of earlier Harlem Renaissance studies has illustrated the intertwined relationship of political, often radical, and artistic-aesthetic aspects of early twentieth-century black cultural activity and the key role played by Caribbeans. Drawing on these insights, this essay outlines that the transnational aspects of a black-centred cultural phenomenon have been better understood through a greater emphasis on Caribbean cross-currents.

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