Author(s): Alain Locke; Jeffrey C. Stewart (Introduction by, Editor); Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor)

Modern Thought

Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke's most influential essays on the Black arts as an emancipatory platform for Black people and America, edited by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Wrestling with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem, Locke asked the question-how shall Black people think of themselves? Rather than as a "problem," Locke argued that African Americans should see themselves as artists whose African-derived creativity was the answer to America's long struggle to foster an identity for itself in world culture. Controversially, Locke, a queer Black intellectual, recommended that Black artists turn away from trying to answer racism in their art and instead develop an art of catharsis that uncovered the inner life of Black people as a rich archive of beauty and self-love. For Locke, the New Negro was the iterative African American who continually updated Black identity through the arts and created a beautiful alternative to the dominant view not only of Black people but of America itself. Book jacket.