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Chapter 3: "The Conventional Blindness of the Caucasian Eye"
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Chapter 3 "The Conventional Blindness of the Caucasian Eye" On March 21, 1924, at a dinner held for luminaries at Harlem's Civic Club, Alain Locke expressed his belief that the newer generation of black writers possessed "enough talent now to begin to have a movement-and express a school of thought."1 Appointed as master of ceremonies by Charles S. Johnson, his friend and the organizer of the dinner, Locke presided over the event in the early stages of his career as an aesthetic and cultural critic-as a young man whose reputation rested on having been the first black Rhodes scholar, in 1907; a PhD from Harvard a decade later; and a contributor of editorial advice and intelligent essays to the journaljohnson founded in 1923, Opportunity. Locke did not belong to the older generation of black intellectuals, a generation he identified with W E. B. DuBois during the dinner. Nor did he, at thirty-eight years of age, belong to the far younger generation of black writers bursting onto the Harlem scene. Betwixt and between these two groups, Locke began to envision himself as an esteemed interlocutor within the black race and as ambassador of the race to America. The dinner representedjohnson's vision of an influential role for Locke, because the stakes for the younger generation were so high. Two weeks before the dinner,Johnson asked Locke "to present this newer school of writers . There seems to be insistence on getting you to assume the leading role for the movement. I regard you as a sort of 'Dean' of this younger group."2 Locke also served as a "midwife" and "father" of the movement.3 He was, simultaneously, the intellectual president of a cultural institution, a nurturer of black artistic "youth," and a demanding figure who tended to historicize Mrican American literature in patrilineal terms.4 The dinner underscored Locke's newfound status. If, before the dinner, he was merely writing about Negro art and culture, afterward, his abundant corpus of aesthetic and cultural criticism resonated with the symbolic authority he earned from the 1924 event. One year later, Locke's leadership received another boost. He edited and published two widely circulated 72 Chapter 3 and critically respected volumes, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro," in the March 1 issue of The Survey Graphic and an expanded version released later that year in book form as The New Negro. Examining and exhibiting the effiorescent black artwork of the 1920s, these 1925 collections servedand still serve-as the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful, and canonized texts of black culture during the movement they embody, the so-called Harlem Renaissance. Of all the essays Locke published over his career, the ones he included in these volumes were his most influential, and therefore his most important. Two essays in The New Negro--"Negro Youth Speaks" and "The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts"-are especially meaningful. At a climactic moment in the first essay, a comprehensive introduction to the literary component of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke declares that "realism in 'crossing the Potomac' had also to cross the color line" in order to consummate the literary movement.5 At a crucial section of the second essay, Locke accuses the dean of American painters, black artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, of perpetuating "the conventional blindness of the Caucasian eye with respect to the racial material at their [painters'] immediate disposal."6 These two incidental statements link discursively and conceptually. The first encapsulates Locke's appreciation of avant-garde and multiethnic conventions of racial realism; the second segues into his criticism of cosmopolitan and academically trained black painters who tended to avoid or complicate such conventions. These two statements are keys to reinterpreting the historical assumptions, the principles of canonical selection, and the stakes in Locke's ambassadorial vision of the Harlem Renaissance and its predominant school or genre of racial realism, New Negro modernism. The lore cycle of racial realism determined New Negro modernism. Modernism does not necessarily correspond with the "high" American modernism often attributed to avant-garde writers like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, although scholars have shown that these and other white writers influenced black literary theories and practices of racial realism during the Harlem Renaissance.7 Nor does it necessarily mean the ''Afro-modernism" of a poet like Sterling Brown, known for experimenting with the blues and folklore in ways that writers of the Harlem Renaissance could not yet handle.8 Nor, finally, does it pertain...