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Acknowledgments
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429 Acknowledgments Often in scholarly endeavors, timing is everything. The paths of the editors of this volume crossed several times for nearly fifteen years leading up to this publication . Not only were we nearly fellow graduate students at New York University but, in different years, we each held the Erskine A. Peters Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame. In the years that followed our Peters years, we routinely saw one another at conferences, where our brief conversations revealed a shared interest in the New Negro movement, in rethinking the study of black life, arts, and politics in the 1920s and 1930s beyond the seemingly singular literary frame of the Harlem Renaissance. We met once again shortly before the publication of Davarian’s Chicago’s New Negroes (2007), when a much longer conversation about the growing number of young scholars writing on the New Negro movement convinced us both that there was a need for a collection adequately broad, thematically diverse, theoretically rich, and globally focused to capture this burgeoning field. Still, the auspicious timing of those conversations to have culminated in the volume you now have before you had less to do with us or our conversations per se than with the wealth of scholars working on this era. We were truly honored that so many scholars, both up-and-comers and established stars, agreed to play some role in making this project possible. An important group of colleagues and friends heard, read, debated, supported, or enriched some aspect of this larger work: Shawn Alexander, Mia Bay, Corey Capers , Sundiata Cha-Jua, Jelani Cobb, Jonathan Coit, Melissa Cooper-Caraballo, Sylviane Diouf, Brent Hayes Edwards, Michael Flug, Rena Fraden, Tiffany Gill, Johnathan Gray, Richard Iton, John Jackson, Kelly Josephs, Robin D. G. Kelley, Deborah Levenson, Thabiti Lewis, Seth Markle, Carter Mathes, Quincy Mills, Jessica Millward, Mark Anthony Neal, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Diana Paulin, Vijay Prashad, Samuel Roberts, David Roediger, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Evie Shockley , John Stauffer, Michelle Stephens, Martin Summers, Rebecca Wanzo, Fanon Che Wilkins, Mabel Wilson, Victoria Wolcott, Edlie Wong, and Susan Zeiger. When we conceived of this project, the first press that came to mind was Minnesota, and that was because of one man: Richard Morrison. His care, focus , brilliance, and capacity to translate our greatest ambitions into a finished 430 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS product made us understand the beauty of an amazing editor. His sustained efforts , alongside those of his editorial assistant, Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus, have proven invaluable. The Dean of Faculty Office at Trinity College provided crucial funding for the completion of this project. Early versions of the ideas assembled here were presented as a keynote address at the Triangle African American History Conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Colleagues were also gracious with feedback in various forums, including the Schomburg–Mellon Summer Institute, Duke University, Smith College, and two events that literally brought this whole collection together: the Harlem Renaissance Revisited conference, convened by the University of Connecticut’s Institute for African American Studies (2008), and the “New Negro Reconsidered” panel, organized by Chad Williams, at the American Studies Association meeting in San Antonio, Texas (2010). Finally, to the “little New Negroes” in our lives, we are indebted to our children , Nylan, Noah, and Ellison and Cheyenne and Yesenia, for always reminding us of what is most important. And of course, none of this could have been possible without the ones who make so much possible, Bridgette Baldwin and Delida Sanchez-Makalani. ...