The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (review)

Two decades ago, Henry Louis Gates Jr. published a seminal essay, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” identifying African-American discourse between 1895 and 1925 as the “crux of the period of Black intellectual reconstruction” (131) and the “era of the myth of the New Negro” (132). Through his rehistoricization of the New Negro, Gates demonstrates that the term does not represent “an entity or group of entities” (133) but a complex form of racial representation that exists “as a coded system of signs, complete with masks and mythology” (133–4), one that since 1895 has exhibited a discernable tension “between strictly political concerns and strictly artistic concerns” (135). Since Gates’s evaluation of the relationship between politics and racial representation, numerous scholars including Barbara Foley, Marlon Ross, Jane Nadell, Anne Elizabeth Carroll, and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson have extended research into the ways in which radicalism, sexuality, aesthetics, race, and gender have intersected with New Negro identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹

In their insightful anthology, The New Negro, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett further recent intellectual approaches by exploring the rhetoric of racial uplift—consolidated around the term “The New Negro”--that was responsible for the intellectual, political, and cultural transformation of African-American identity between Reconstruction and the Second World War. While not engaging the important southern origins of the concept, this anthology is unique in its efforts to broaden the scope of New Negro criticism by employing an interdisciplinary perspective that views African- American discourse of this period through a lens of cultural studies. In doing so, Gates and Jarrett reward readers with a diverse array of essays that includes canonical pieces by W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and George S. Schuyler that are complimented by selections from Harry Alan Potamkin, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong. With contributions from sundry artists, critics, and scholars of African-American culture, this one-hundred-twelve essay collection interprets the New Negro as a “major discursive cornerstone of racial representation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (2) and one that is a fundamental component of critical conversations regarding African- American culture today.

The anthology opens with essays that provide a window on the earliest political function of a new racial representation, one that sought to replace white-based notions of black inferiority with a racial consciousness that would help reshape the way African Americans perceived themselves. For Reverend W. E. C. Wright’s, “The New Negro,” (1894), education becomes a defining feature of post-reconstruction African-American identity, such that formal training makes New Negroes “at once examples and apostles of a new era” (24). Wright’s foundational perspective reverberates through the writing of numerous African-American intellectuals such as Du Bois, whose own “talented tenth” would become “leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people” upon graduation from colleges and universities.² Decades before Locke announced a spiritual and psychological transformation that ushered in the New Negro of the 1920s, J. W. E. Bowen’s “An Appeal to the King,” (1895), claimed that a renewed “consciousness” or “racial personality under the blaze of a new civilization” (32) would enable the New Negro of the late nineteenth century to achieve his social and political aims.

More than twenty responses to a 1926 questionnaire distributed by The Crisis highlight the section entitled “How Should Art Portray the Negro?” Of central concern are the ways in which writers, white and black, portray African Americans in visual and literary culture. Attempting to move beyond superficial “Old” Negro types (plantation “uncles, “mammies,” and “samboes,”) so prevalent on the stage in both the North and South, and prolific in the romantic racialism of white fiction writers, African-American artists question the way to enter a viable cultural marketplace without compromising individual expression. In...