Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. His most recent books include Finding Oprah's Roots and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. Gene Andrew Jarrett is associate professor of English and African American studies at Boston University. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature.

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"This illuminating and indispensable anthology lays bare a fascinating genealogy of the most frequently invoked trope in the history of U.S. Black culture and politics: The New Negro. Professors Gates and Jarrett take us on an intellectual journey through a crucial half century of Black thought that remains relevant in our time!"--Cornel West, author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters

"This anthology will make a marvelous companion to any course on the Harlem Renaissance or the 'New Negro' phenomenon, and an excellent resource even for advanced scholars looking for a compendium of essays that contextualize African American cultural and political thought between the 1890s and 1930s. The range of authors is admirable and many of these essays are immensely readable--pithy, vituperative, inspiriting, and humorous by turns."--George B. Hutchinson, Indiana University

"Bringing together a comprehensive body of essays from a wide range of fields, this anthology will be invaluable to scholars and students of the period from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Harlem Renaissance. It provides not only canonical texts, but also lesser-known pieces, so that it will enhance our understanding of this important period."--Valerie Smith, Princeton University

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The New Negro

Princeton University Press

Introduction

We are at the commencement of a "negroid" renaissance ... that will have in time as much importance in literary history as the much spoken of and much praised Celtic and Canadian renaissance. -William Stanley Braithwaite (1901) ... Rough hewn from the jungle and the desert's sands, Slavery was the chisel that fashioned him to form, And gave him all the arts and sciences had won. The lyncher, mob, and stake have been his emery wheel, TO MAKE A POLISHED MAN of strength and power. In him, the latest birth of freedom, God hath again made all things new. Europe and Asia with ebbing tides recede, America's unfinished arch of freedom waits, Till he, the corner stone of strength Is lifted into place and power. Behold him! dauntless and unafraid he stands. He comes with laden arms, Bearing rich gifts to science, religion, poetry and song ... -Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom, "The New Negro" (1923)

The three epigraphs tell the classic story of the American Negro's symbolic transition from "Old" to "New" between Reconstruction and World War II. During this period, the Old Negro was a trope that depicted the African diaspora as an inferior race. Allegedly, Negro uncles, mammies, and chillun' dressed, talked, behaved, and thought in ways that lacked the kind of sophistication and refinement generally attributed to Anglo America. Such caricatures oversimplified black subjectivity and experiences, while ridiculing the idea of black assimilability to American civilization. African American discourses of the New Negro, however, emerged to contest degrading black stereotypes. Literature, photographs, illustrations, theater, and speeches were but a few of the contexts in which African Americans declared that the race could be morally, intellectually, and culturally elevated to civilization.

In the wake of recent scholarship that has examined the remarkable history of the New Negro, this anthology hopes to flesh it out even further, showing why the New Negro was one of the most compelling stories of racial uplift that circulated throughout U.S. intellectual society, culture, and politics. By reprinting approximately one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays written or published between 1892 and 1938, we lay the groundwork for scholars, teachers, students, and general readers to learn more about the political interconnection of race, representation, and African American culture. Racial representation, we argue, functioned as an ideological or philosophical bridge between the cultural politics and the political culture of African America. Culture politics-or the politics of culture-mainly refers to how people acquire, understand, and apply power in their relationships to one another. Such power relations, in turn, underwrite the formation of certain patterns of human values, discourses, attitudes, actions, or artifacts. By contrast, political culture-or the culture of politics-emphasizes how cultural patterns inform the institutions, organizations, and interest groups of public policy or governmental activity. With these two preliminary definitions in mind, this anthology aims to show that the New Negro was a major discursive cornerstone of racial representation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is more, this discourse helped to generate the terms by which we describe and understand African American culture today.

The tropes, politics, and discourses of racial uplift that we intend to explain in this introduction outline the parameters of what could be thought of as "New Negro criticism." This tradition comprises not only essays that explicitly mention the term "New Negro," but also those involved in a wider critical conversation on race, representation, and African American culture-a conversation of which the trope of a New Negro was, of course, an original, defining feature. For this anthology, we have chosen a vast array of essays written by sophisticated critics, historians, and thinkers interested in anchoring the meanings of art, culture, and politics to racial Representation.

The Trope of a New Negro

Frederick Douglass, the great nineteenth-century writer and orator, was widely advertised during his lifetime as "the representative colored man of the United States." It was a designation that Douglass liked; indeed, he seemed to have encouraged its use. What a curious manner by which to be known, or by which to be recalled: the representative colored man of these United States. But in what sense was Frederick Douglass "representative"? In the sense of mode, or mean, or median? Certainly not Frederick Douglass, a man of learning, an author of three masterful autobiographies as well as hundreds of speeches and essays. Douglass could not be mistaken for the mean, the mode, or the median of the African American community of the nineteenth century. Clearly, another sense of representation obtains here, one that we tend to forget.

Douglass was the representative colored man in the United States because he was the most presentable. And he was the most presentable because of the presence he had established as a master of voice. When Douglass spoke or wrote, he did so "for" the Negro, in a relation of part for whole. He spoke to recreate the public face of the race. Douglass, then, was the most representative colored man both because he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion. African Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images.

The word "reconstruction" and the concepts that it connotes are so familiar to American historians and to scholars of African American studies that we tend to forget the word's etymology and its complex layers of signification. The dictionary states that to reconstruct means "to construct anew in the mind; to restore [something past] mentally." "Reconstruction," it tells us, consists of "the action or process of reconstructing," or "an instance or example of this; a thing reconstructed." "Reconstruction" is also the proper name for "the process by which after the Civil War the States which had seceded were restored to the rights and privileges of the Union." This period, we know, commenced officially with the passage (over President Andrew Johnson's veto) of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and ended with what is known popularly as the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction, then, endured officially for a mere ten years, to be replaced by a dark period in American history known as Redemption, which Sterling Brown once said lasted in the South from roughly 1876 "to yesterday"! By the turn of the century, Southern Redemption had become fused with black disenfranchisement and the rise of the white supremacist movement, led by the Ku Klux Klan.

Moreover, the dictionary defines "construction" as the process of putting "a specified interpretation on." "Construction" also means "the action of framing, devising, or forming, by the putting together of parts." "Construction" signifies as well "the manner in which a thing is artificially constructed...