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17. The Conjunctural Field of New Negro Studies
- University of Minnesota Press
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401 The Conjunctural Field of New Negro Studies MICHELLE ANN STEPHENS 17 The New Negro is here. Perhaps no more courageous than the Old Negro who dropped his shackles in 1863, and fought against ignorance, propaganda , lethargy and persecution, but better informed, privy to his past, understanding of the present, unafraid of the future. . . . He is aware that the balance of power is shifting in the world and so are his cousins in Africa, in India, in Malaysia, the Caribbean and China. —George Schuyler, Crisis, 1938 In the decades since the 1988 publication of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential essay “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” his notion of the trope of a New Negro has come under quite a bit of critical scrutiny.1 At the same time, some of Gates’s key claims have since become canonical. The first was that the New Negro was engaged primarily in a politics of visual re-presentation. The trope of the New Negro was literally “an image of the black,” blackness itself the product of an act of self-reconstruction performed in the face of a racializing (white) gaze. Gates justified this claim by placing print cartoons and portrait photography demonstrating how African Americans chose to represent themselves visually, alongside a “visual essay” of racist images that circulated in various popular cultural forms throughout the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century. These included postcards with photographs of lynchings, of black Americans stereotypically dressed as “ole time niggers,” racist cartoon caricatures found on “coon song” sheet music, magazine covers, and advertisements, and the cover of a popular children’s board game. Here and in his preface for Thelma Golden’s Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Gates describes the force of this visual archive in overdetermining African American conceptions of black identity at the turn and in the early decades of the twentieth century.2 Gates’s second insight is historical; he points to the trajectory of the New Negro movement as beginning in 1895, well before the peak of the Harlem Renaissance 402 MICHELLE ANN STEPHENS in the mid-1920s, and entailing a shift from politics to aesthetics. This leads him to the argument that is the most problematic for the authors included in Escape from New York, namely, that the “‘New Negro,’ of course, was only a metaphor...a rhetorical figure” who existed only in “the non-place of language.”3 For the cultural , social, and political historians included in this collection, Gates’s second claim reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of his location as a literary and cultural studies scholar for whom, by the 1920s, the New Negro movement had narrowed into the more purely aesthetic Harlem Renaissance. As heralded in its title, the greatest critique Escape from New York offers is that, when we collapse the New Negro movement into the artistic Harlem Renaissance, this ties the New Negro as a trope inescapably to Harlem, and vice versa—with Harlem as the focus, the New Negro becomes a purely aesthetic category. In contrast, the essays in Escape from New York reenact on a broader scale the insights of historian Ernest Allen Jr. in an essay productively placed in dialogue with Gates’s text. In “The New Negro: Explorations in Identity and Social Consciousness, 1910–1922,” Allen usefully fleshes out a political New Negro of the 1910s and 1920s, expanding on Gates’s sense of the New Negro as a purely rhetorical figure.4 Allen’s New Negro of the 1920s sets the stage for the proletarian turn of post-Depression works such as Richard Wright’s Native Son.5 Notably , however, Allen’s political New Negro was as internally contradictory as the one split between the forces of the aesthetic and the political in Gates’s account. Allen describes a group, “torn between bourgeois nationalist and bourgeois assimilationist proclivities” and split along a “nationalist/socialist divide in which questions of social identity and of envisioned social structure both played a role.”6 For a previous generation of scholars and critics on the New Negro, Robert A. Hill exemplary among them, it was this line between different ideological visions, rather than the one between art or culture and political processes, that most clearly defined the period.7 In their introductions and afterwords to George Schuyler’s Black Empire and Ethiopian Stories, Hill and Kent Rasmussen took literary form and rhetorical devices...