Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era

Part I. Representative Characters

part i Representative Characters The New Negro’s Representative Elements and Official Internationalism Arriving on the heels of the nineteenth-century heyday of blackface minstrelsy, the years of the 1890s through the 1930s witnessed a struggle on the part of many African Americans to wrest the role of black race representation from white America. This was a struggle against what came to be known as the Old Negro, a myth and formula that circulated as the condensation of minstrelesque figures ranging from Jim Crow to Zip Coon, from Rastus to Sambo, and from Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima. Calling on black writers and artists to combat the degrading legacies of the Old Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois proposed the following thought experiment: “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans? Now turn it around. Suppose you were to write a story and put in the kind of people you know and like and imagine” (“Criteria” 296). For many black American writers of this era, the kind of people to know and like and imagine circulated under the banner of the New Negro, a discursive formation seeking to supplant “the Negro painted by white Americans.” The trope of the New Negro offered an image conflating blackness with urban sophistication, educational attainment, middle-class poise, and economic success. For many members of the black intelligentsia, 12 / representative characters using writing and art to evoke these qualities—and indeed performing these qualities bodily—was supposed to argue for a black humanity meriting the full rights of US citizenship. If middle-class poise was less than typical among the masses of black US citizens who were only one generation removed from slavery, then the comparatively elite cultural arbiters of the New Negro era sought ways to privilege their own middle-class attributes and performances in the construction of the race’s public face. As Alain Locke wrote the introduction for his influential anthology The New Negro (1925), he reached for terminology that could, in apparently salutary ways, confuse the category of the demographically typical with the category of the demographically exceptional, which Du Bois famously referred to as the race’s talented tenth.1 Capitalizing on the slippage between representative as typical and representative as elect, Locke referred to New Negro society as made up of “the more intelligent and representative elements ” of the race (9). This play on the term representative was a shrewd instance of demographic legerdemain, as on a discursive level it operated to move the talented tenth from the race’s margins to the race’s center, supplanting the masses’ representative character (based on perceived status as typical) with a representative character evoked by exceptional presentability.2 Locke, of course, was not alone in working to construct the race’s elite as representative, and several scholars have offered genealogies that trace the production of the New Negro’s representational relationship to the black masses. Intriguingly, this scholarship points in unexpected ways to the foundational roles played by official international diplomacy in evoking New Negro race representation. J. Martin Favor has astutely pointed toward New Negro writers who sought to write themselves “into a folk positionality” which thereby created an aura of authenticity linking them to the larger racial constituency they sought to represent (12). Favor describes a New Negro culture in which individuals attempted to speak as rather than for Negroes, a pose permitting speakers to “assert their own unique set of circumstances . . . rather than adhering to a specific representational protocol” (11). If, as Favor implies, the New Negro era saw an impulse toward individual expression that competed with a demand for following representational protocol, then I would argue that the demands of protocol arose in part through numerous New Negro interactionswiththestricturesofofficialinternationalrelations.Through years of work as US diplomatic and consular officials, major race representatives including Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, Mifflin representative characters / 13 Wistar Gibbs, and John Stephens Durham helped promote an intense and reciprocal relationship between the protocols of international relations and New Negro strategies for interracial relations. Offering a genealogy that is in some ways allied with Favor’s, Barbara Foley has pointed toward the volkish tropes of region and soil as assuming special significance in the New Negro representational matrix. Foley describes New Negro writers...