The making of the new negro
Subtitle: black authorship, masculinity, and sexuality in the Harlem renaissance
By: Anna Pochmara
Series: American studies; American studies (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: [Amsterdam]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9789089643193; 9789048514236
Subjects: Civilization; African American authors; Intellectual life; History and criticism; American literature; African influences; African Americans
Other titles: Black authorship, masculinity, and sexuality in the Harlem renaissance
Description: The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance, which for many decades did not attract a lot of scholarly attention, until, in the 1990s, many scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was. Using African American published texts, American archives and unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book focuses both on the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and on writers who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significance for the movement, such as Wallace Thurman. Its perspective combines gender, sexuality, and race studies with a thorough literary analysis and historicist investigation, an approach that has not been extensively applied to analyze the New Negro Renaissance.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-265) and index.
Table of contents: title: Ch.1. Prologue : The question of manhood in the Booker T. Washington - W.E.B. Du Bois debate; title: PART I : Alain Locke and the new negro; title: Ch. 2. Midwifery and camaraderie : Alain Locke's tropes of gender and sexuality; title: Ch. 3 Arts, war, and the brave new negro : gendering the black aesthetic; title: PART 2 : Wallace Thurman and niggerati manor. Ch. 4. Gangsters and bootblacks, rent parties and railroad flats : Wallace Thurman's challenges to the black bourgeoisie; title: Ch. 5. Discontents of the black dandy; title: Ch. 6. Epilogue : Richard Wright's interrogations of the new negro.