Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro

5. From the New Negro to The New Negro

198 5 From the New Negro to The New Negro The young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life. —Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks” (1925) Returning to the question raised at the outset of this inquiry, how did the arms-bearing, anticapitalist New Negro of 1919 get transmuted into the culture hero of The New Negro (1925)? While the causal threads are many, Alain Locke’s guiding role is clearly of central importance . In this chapter, I investigate the bodies of theory Locke brought to the making of his anthology; examine his pragmatist theory of “secondary race consciousness” and the aporias attendant upon it; demonstrate the expunging of radicalism and the consolidation of nationalism— simultaneously Negro and American—in his creation of The New Negro out of its Survey Graphic predecessor; and examine the ideological function of the organic trope in articulating the connections among soil, folk, race, and nation in The New Negro’s metonymic nationalist program. Even though Locke was several degrees removed from Marxism—both temporally and doctrinally—by the time he published The New Negro, the process from which his text emerged cannot be understood apart from the larger contradictions shaping the theory and practice of leftist politics in 1919 and its aftermath. The concept of the folk, I argue, figures as the central conceptual mechanism helping Locke to shift the New Negro movement from politics to culture, self-determinationist militancy to quietistic pluralist From the New Negro to The New Negro 199 patriotism. Drawing on folk origins to lay claim to the Negro’s Americanism was in one sense nothing new to discourses addressing the problematics of African American identity, going back at least as far as Du Bois’s 1903 declaration, in The Souls of Black Folk, that the African American folksong was “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.” But the notion that the folk constitute the core identity of any nation—and that black folk might play this role in and for the United States—took on particular resonance in the wake of 1919, when the various discourses of nationalism—selfdeterminationist , liberal pluralist, and 100 percent Americanist—competed for popular legitimacy and elite support. Locke’s reconceptualization of the newly migrated proletariat as a folk figured centrally in his turn from class consciousness to class collaborationism.1 “The Black Arts of Interpretation”: Vernacular Theory and Its Critique Before examining the ideological crucible from which The New Negro emerged, it bears noting that some of the issues in the debate over the nature and extent of the Negro’s belonging in the United States and in Locke’s seizing on the category of the folk to argue his case during the New Negro movement of the mid-1920s remain today. Locke’s treatment of the folk as a privileged entry point into the definition of African American culture has been carried forward into the vernacular theories of African American literature that—espoused by such influential critics as Bernard Bell, Houston Baker, and Henry Louis Gates—have done much over the past twenty years to shape not only the canon of African American literature but also the paradigms through which this literature is routinely studied. Bell, who notes that the wartime and postwar migration and urbanization led “[r]ace conscious intellectuals to tap the roots of their ethnic heritage with varying degrees of ambivalence,” argues that Herderian notions of folkishness have definitively influenced African American literature from its inception as a self-conscious tradition. “Herder’s belief that the highest cultural values are to be found in the lowest orders of society,” contends Bell, informed the most significant developments in African American literature from the early twentieth century through the black arts movement. Baker, echoing Du Bois, writes that “a folk is always, out of the very necessities of definition, possessed of a guiding or tutelary spirit—an immanent quality of aspiration that is fittingly sounded in its treasured rituals.” Seeing an act of “radical marronage ”—that is, maroon rebellion—in Locke’s declaration that Ameri- 200 Spectres of 1919 can Negroes constituted “not a ‘problem’ but a nation,” Baker treats The New Negro as an exemplary instance of “guerrilla warfare.” For Baker, the vernacular approach to African American literature is explicitly linked with self-determinationist nationalism; the “national impulse valorized by...