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THE NEW NEGRO: VOICES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE EDITED BY ALAIN LOCKE

The New Negro alerted the world in 1925 that something approaching a cultural revolution was taking place among blacks in New York, as well as elsewhere in the United States and perhaps around the world. The book also attempted in a fairly ambitious, expansive way to offer a definition of this cultural movement.

The New Negro exudes more than energy- it exudes a quality suspiciously like joy, the great quality that J.A Rogers sees in jazz. This quality of youthful energy and joy is in contrast to the lassitude described in the greatest poem of the age, T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which purported to measure the spirituality and dynamism of European civilization after the war. The energy and joy in The New Negro have political purposes; they are subversive, and thus come tinged with quality not unlike thrilling psychological neuroticism, which serves to authenticate the modernist identity of the New Negro. Whatever one may say of the book, one does not find it antiquarian, or a period piece. Even today, it remains a reliable index to the black American sensibility at that point where art and politics meet, as well as to the events in Harlem and elsewhere among blacks in the 1920s.

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Overview

The New Negro alerted the world in 1925 that something approaching a cultural revolution was taking place among blacks in New York, as well as elsewhere in the United States and perhaps around the world. The book also attempted in a fairly ambitious, expansive way to offer a definition of this cultural movement.

The New Negro exudes more than energy- it exudes a quality suspiciously like joy, the great quality that J.A Rogers sees in jazz. This quality of youthful energy and joy is in contrast to the lassitude described in the greatest poem of the age, T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which purported to measure the spirituality and dynamism of European civilization after the war. The energy and joy in The New Negro have political purposes; they are subversive, and thus come tinged with quality not unlike thrilling psychological neuroticism, which serves to authenticate the modernist identity of the New Negro. Whatever one may say of the book, one does not find it antiquarian, or a period piece. Even today, it remains a reliable index to the black American sensibility at that point where art and politics meet, as well as to the events in Harlem and elsewhere among blacks in the 1920s.

“THE NEW NEGRO: VOICES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE EDITED BY ALAIN LOCKE”

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