The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings

by Alain LeRoy Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart (Editor), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor)

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imaginationA Penguin ClassicFor months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the "Negro problem" and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves. The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke's Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a "being-in-the-world" that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Politics, African American, History, Art, Anthologies

477 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 18, 2022

About the author

American educator and writer Alain LeRoy Locke, whose include Four Negro Poets (1927) and Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), championed the Harlem renaissance.

People best remember this philosopher as the chief interpreter. Harvard University in 1907 graduated Locke, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first black Rhodes scholar. He studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin and then received a Philosophiae Doctor in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Aesthetics strongly concerned this humanist. His philosophy, cultural pluralism, emphasized the determining of values, most especially the respect for the uniqueness of each personality, to guide human conduct and interrelationships.

Locke taught at Howard University in District of Columbia for nearly forty years.

Reviews

[T.R. Ormond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book and I guarantee you will want to read Jeffrey C. Stewart's The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. Stewart's intro to this collection makes the book shine and will hopefully inspire a lot of new readers for Locke.

As much as I admire W.E.B. DuBois's accomplishments, I feel that Locke's views on aesthetics offer an important alternative. DuBois is too utilitarian. Locke brings aesthetics back to subjectivity and freedom. For Locke, art is a teleology of the self; For DuBois it is a teleology of the common cause. There is a time and a place for both, but, ultimately, I think Locke's presentation is the correct one, for even if we accept DuBois's position that all art be propaganda surely that is only in order to finally raise society to the level that Locke envisages...

Have a listen to Stewart's acceptance speech at the 2019 American book awards, starting at 1h, 46min, 28sec. https://www.c-span.org/video/?465307-...

[Ell, Ess Jaeva · Rating 2 out of 5]

dnf boooooring

[Gabrielle Huston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the essay 'The New Negro' for HUMS 4000