Race & Gender In Modernist America

THE NEW NEGRO AND THE NEW WOMAN
Race & gender in Modernist America

THE NEW NEGRO: Harlem

• In a nation that holds newness as a fundamental ideal and whose national character is the New Man (Adam), the figures of the New Negro or the New Woman challenged the race and gender components of such American myth.
• The waves of African who departed from the south (known as the Great Migration)to the northern states arrived mostly in New York. By 1900, some of them moved to the newly-built suburb of Harlem, which would become the “black capital” of the world. The low price of real estate and the prospect of employment were key for this massive concentration, but these new neighbours were also eager to leave behind the severely racist communities of the south.
• Migration and economicconditions transformed Harlem into a race capital, where African Americans developed a strong feeling of race pride and heritage, which paved the way for the achievement of common objectives: self-consciousness and racial pride were pivotal for Harlems, who, rid of the sense of apology for existing, fuelled the black social discourse and creativity.
• The New Negro: Harlem’s intellectuals spreadthe necessity of a revision of civil rights and artistic canons alike. The summing up of social, economic and intellectual energies transformed Harlem into the headquarters of the New Negro spirit.Alain Leroy Locke defined the philosophy of this figure as the revelation of the Old Negro as a mythical figure, socially constructed to suit the purposes and conscience of whites.
• If the Modernistauthors of the era repudiated tradition and civilization, they still understood their cultural environment as Eurocentric (i.e. white and western), where the African Americans did not fit. The New Negro struggled for a new social and intellectual background in which he could feel at ease, and art was the only arena in which they could express themselves, since they had been excluded from education,politics and business.
• Harlem Renaissance: This creative outburst adopted a variety of forms: music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature… However, all these art forms strove to make conscious use of Africanisms as valid cultural and aesthetic practices, and to celebrate black heritage against white supremacy.
Black American literature in this period lived a moment of revival. Du Bois, forinstance, stated the “legitimate demands” of his people, and demanded for them more ambitious and egalitarian aims. He was a founding member of the Niagara Movement, the first American all-black movement against racial discrimination, which would later develop into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
This literary movement beheld the debate on whether art shouldbecome an ideological weapon used for political purposes. Du Bois accounted for the African Americans’ position in literature and society with the expression double-consciousness “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”. He expressed his wish to merge both selves into a “better and truer self” (integrationalist viewpoint). Hughes, on the other hand, claimed that aNegro artist should avoid conforming to white patterns.
One of the principal achievements of the Harlem Renaissance was the recovery of black rhetorical tradition in such musical forms as blues, jazz and gospel. In it language and music are closely related, since most of the African languages from the west of Africa posses pitch, timber and timing, structural elements of music. This continuum ofblack creative expression was labelled with the term orature.

• Depression put an end to the creative flow of the Harlem Renaissance because its benefactors could hardly support the artists any longer. Moreover, African American activists became well aware that an improvement in civil rights was not to be the consequence of artistic excellence. However, the movement left an indelible print in...