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16. Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance Brent Hayes Edwards Whether in the words of Alain Locke, Hubert Harrison, Jane Nardal, or W. E. B. DuBois, the point that the modern phenomenon of the New Negro is international resurfaces time and time again in black expression between the world wars. In The New Negro, Locke goes so far as to claim that the Negro’s newness is closely related to his “new internationalism,” which represents one of the few “constructive channels” for black expression beyond the “cramped horizons” of postwar U.S. racism and brutality.1 New Negro internationalism, evidenced for Locke by the proliferation in the 1920s of a multilingual and “cosmopolitan” black print culture and by transnational organizations like the Pan-African Congress, “is primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation” (NN 14–15). But correspondence and “recaptured” contact among peoples of African descent is only one strategy in what Nathan Huggins has described as the “post-war effort to thrust Negro social thought into an international arena.”2 Black intellectuals and activists were especially eager to participate in the institutional discourses of internationalism that developed in the West after World War I, particularly through the League of Nations. For instance, DuBois conceived of the Pan-African Congress in part as a means to influence the Versailles Peace Conference meetings on the question of former German colonies in Africa, intending to interject a black voice into the growing discourse of international civil society because he was certain that institutions such as the League would be at the center of postwar global power. “I went to Paris because today the destinies of mankind center there,” he told the readers of The Crisis.3 288 Likewise, the radicalization of Marcus Garvey was rooted not just in the race riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919, but also in the international implications of that unrest, particularly in terms of labor revolts in the Caribbean. This concern led directly to the emergence of the “Magna Carta” of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” adopted at the 1920 international convention, and also to the UNIA’s many attempts throughout the decade to organize transnationally, both in the Americas and in Africa itself (in Liberia in particular ).4 The point is that even given their pronounced political differences, interwar black intellectuals such as Locke, DuBois, and Garvey shared what we might term an internationalist imperative, continually articulating the “race problem as a world problem.”5 This imperative is belied by much of the scholarship on the period, which has tended to emphasize seemingly nation-bound themes of cultural nationalism , civil rights, and uplift in the “Harlem Renaissance.”6 This essay will be a necessarily preliminary attempt to come to terms with the reminders of a handful of scholars such as Michel Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and Robert Stepto that “the Renaissance was international in scale both in terms of where its contributors came from and in terms of its being merely the North American component of something larger and grander. . . .”7 Although black intellectuals in the period do not explicitly use the term, I understand this facet of the Renaissance as the emergence of a complex black discourse of diaspora in the interwar period —a discourse arising out of the Old Testament metaphorology that Locke, for one, alludes to in charting the “effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation,” and in arguing more pointedly that “As with the Jew, persecution is making the Negro international” (14). Rather than simply investigate the ways that U.S. black intellectuals imagined the African diaspora, however, I will take up this theme by reading three flash points of a particular conjuncture of black internationalist discourses— the long-running dialogue between United States–based English-speaking writers and their Francophone counterparts. Although the few critics who have engaged this issue have generally concentrated on the ideological differences and representational conundrums that fracture any articulation of diaspora , I will pay particular attention to the work of language difference among groups of African descent, which (as much as ideology or representation) is at the root of what Kenneth Warren has called “the ambiguities that inhere in diasporic thought—ambiguities that make diasporic visions possible.”8 It has already been recognized that one way to consider the diasporic stirrings in the Renaissance is to...

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