Alain Locke

Part I, The Negro renaissance: The New Negro; Negro Art and America; The Negro in American Literature; Negro Youth speaks; Fiction; Poetry; Drama; Music; The Negro digs up his Past; Part II, The New Negro in a New World: The Negro Pioneers; The New frontage on American Life; The New Scene; The Negro and the American Tradition; Worlds of Color

The New Negro

Discusses Locke's life and views and their impact on American philosophy, as well as his role in the Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

The Philosophy of Alain Locke

Race Contacts and Interracial Relations comprises five lectures that Alain Locke, Howard University professor of philosophy and critic of the Harlem Renaissance, delivered in 1916 at Howard University. Locke examines race and racism in twentieth-century social relations and provides a means of analyzing race and ethnic conflict in relation to economic and political changes in society. He suggests that a way to understand racial conflict is to look at nonracial issues that divide a society and at how race becomes a symbol of those issues and conflicts. Locke's early recognition and articulation of Franz Boas's theory of race in these lectures and his contention that racism is socially generated were intellectual departures at the time. While rejecting the biological basis of race, Locke proposes that the social concept of race could be employed by a minority as a cultural strategy for self-help and self-definition. Thus the lectures show that Locke's work in African American art and culture grew out of a considered analysis of race and modern society. In the introduction to this carefully edited volume, Jeffrey Stewart provides background on Alain Locke and other theorists on race whom Locke discusses, situates Locke's ideas on race within the context of his time, and relates Locke's lectures to his thought on art and culture and to contemporary arguments on race.

Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race

Race Contacts and Interracial Relations

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the "Negro problem" and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves. The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke's Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a "being-in-the-world" that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really are: a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.

Selected Writings

The New Negro Aesthetic

Mariah Stewart

A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture

The Critical Temper of Alain Locke

A comprehensive collection of essays by the leading early 20th-century public intellectual covers a broad range of topics from philosophy and literary criticism to race and politics, offering insight into his considerable contributions to the Harlem Renaissance and influence in helping to launch the civil rights movement.

The Works of Alain Locke

Widely regarded as the key text of the Harlem Renaissance, this landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, essays, drama, music, and illustration includes contributions by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and other luminaries.

Alain Locke

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