The New Negro Ed. Alain Locke

The New Negro

• Ed. Alain Locke

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes

• Talking Points

• 1) Heraclites, Time, and Rivers

• 2) How and where do we locate the poem’s persona? For whom does this “I” speak?

• 3) How does time work in this poem?

• 4) How does the poem position history vis-à-vis “the soul” of the persona? 5) How does this positioning reflect Locke’s commitment to investigating Africa as a vehicle for awakening African American self-consciousness?

Little Negro children running in and out and learning to respect themselves through the realization of those treasures. And… as the fire burned in me, I had the mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway… and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on earth.

• Little Negro children running in and out and learning to respect themselves through the realization of those treasures. And… as the fire burned in me, I had the mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway… and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on earth.

• Charlotte Mason

“Heritage” by Countee Cullen

• Talking Points

• 1) The first stanza: What is the central question posed? Why doe the persona invoke “Eden”?

• 2) How and where does the persona discover Africa? How would you characterize the vision of Africa that the persona encounters in a “book one thumbs.”

• 3) What is the nature of the sustenance that the persona finds in this book?

• 4) What is the nature of the tension between the sentiments espoused in italics in the first and third stanzas?

• 5) What do you make of the repetition of the phrase, “So I lie” and its proximity to the persona’s “jungle” machinations about Africa?

• 6) Why can the persona “find no peace” in the fifth stanza?

“Heritage” by Countee Cullen

• Talking Points

• 1) Cont. What is the (repeated) paradox that concludes the fifth stanza?

• 2) What do you make of the invocation of “primal measures” dripping in light of its proximity to the phrase “in an old remembered way.”

• 3) How does the use of the term “My” that begins the sixth stanza complicate (or multiply) the poem’s persona(e)? How does the poem deploy and rework the thematic of conversion?

• 4) What is the significance of the persona’s desire to (re) fashion “heathen gods” vis-à-vis the persona’s “need” for a “human creed”?

“The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts”: Part I

• Main Points

• 1) The art of the American Negro bears little connection or resemblance to the art of African cultures.

• 2) African retentions with regards to a “deep seated aesthetic endowment[s]” may have survived the middle passage, but Aframerican art is an expression of the American Negro’s (and NOT African’s) spirit. It is the product of the unique cultural history of the Negro’s “peculiar” experience in America

“The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” Part II

• Main Points

• 1) Although the art of the American Negro does not manifest a high degree of African influence, the Negro Artist should make it an object of interest, study, and influence on his own art.

• 2) The Negro Artist should take a cue from his European counterparts who have already mined African artistic influences to great advantage and acclaim.

• 3) Hence: Even though the artistic production of the American Negro is not the outgrowth of African influence, his art would nevertheless benefit from the influences of African artistic production.

“[O]ur age is the age of Negro art. The slogan of the aesthetic world is ‘Return to the Primitive.’ The Futurists and the Impressionists are agreed in turning everything upside down in an attempt to achieve the wisdom of the primitive Negro.” Claude McKay

• “[O]ur age is the age of Negro art. The slogan of the aesthetic world is ‘Return to the Primitive.’ The Futurists and the Impressionists are agreed in turning everything upside down in an attempt to achieve the wisdom of the primitive Negro.” Claude McKay

“Song of the Son” Jean Toomer

• Talking Points

• 1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as Shared History

• 2) The question of Africa American origins: Southern or African?

• 3) To whom does the song of the son belong?

• 4) What themes are invoked by Toomer ‘s use of natural elements as symbols? (soil, trees, seeds)

• 5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of a “partial soul” in song?

• 6) Continuity and Change: How is time positioned in this poem?

“The Negro Reaches Out” by W.E.B. Du Bois

• Main Points

• 1) The “race problem” is inextricably linked to modern imperialism insofar as the colonial powers of Europe exploit the color line (in their respective colonies) to maximize the profits of modern industrialism.

• 2) This economic imperialism casts a “shadow” over the darker peoples of the world and gives rise to their common cause: namely, Pan-Africanism. This coalition of the world’s “the darker peoples” is their best chance throw off the economic shackles of European colonization.

• 3) It is folly to think that the evils of imperialism and colonialism are solely the outgrowth of class conflicts (and not conflicts that have racial tensions at their roots) because modern imperialism exploits notions of race and racism to perpetuate itself.

• 4) Hence, the problem of the twentieth century is still the color line (even though Du Bois, now, is approaching this problem from a decidedly Marxist perspective).

“Russian Cathedral” by Claude McKay

• Talking Points

• 1) Supplication and Power Relations

• 2) Ethereal v.s. Earthly riches

• 3) Blending the rhetoric of religious grace with the glorification of wealth

• 4) The reversal: “man’s divinity.” What are the implications of the persona’s substitution of man for God for the poem’s framing of spiritual and material wealth?

• 5) What hierarchies are disrupted by this reversal?

“American Negro Folk Literature”: Uncle Remus and the Trickster Tales

• Talking Points

• 1) Joel Chandler Harris and the Uncle Remus stories as faux-folklore

• 2) The repeated suggestion of African Retentions

• 3) African Atavism and Negro Folklore

“American Negro Folk Literature”

• Talking Points

• 1) What distinguishes authentic folklore from the faux-folk of Joel Chandler Harris?

• 2) African Atavism and Negro Folklore

• 3) Fauset’s call for a thoroughgoing accounting and appreciation of authentic Negro folklore, and the Negro’s contribution to Negro, national, and world literature.

“Spunk” as Trickster Folk-Tale

“The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson

• Talking Points

• 1) Why position a poem as a sermon? What does this say about the role of folk artistic production as the cultural fabric of the African community.

• 2) What does the decision to portray God’s voice in “black dialect” suggest about cultural inheritance and reworking

• 3) What are the metaphorical implications of re-telling Genesis in a style that evokes the Negro pulpit when considered in light of Locke’s and Du Bois’s call for a new self-awareness to be brought about through the project of letters?

• 4) The Negro Church as center of the Negro community?