Alain Locke looked at the New Negro experience through mostly Harlem renaissance scholars, artists, and poets. Baldwin analyzed the New Negro experience through Chicago’s cultural marketplace intellectual life, which included the working-class and leisure-based labor as contribution to the New Negro experience. Baldwin argues that the musicians, beauty culturists, athletes, gamblers, and film directors were all part of Chicago’s New Negro intellectual life. Baldwin says we need to look at the reconstruction of the Black Metropolis in Chicago as both a built environment and an ideal to help understand a more comprehensive New Negro movement. Baldwin argues that the night life of vice in the Black Metropolis could be considered as the basis or foundation for the New Negro experience. Many race leaders did not see music clubs, beauty salons, and theater spaces as venues for the articulation of the metropolis model of race pride that the New Negro resembled. Baldwin created another narrative for these people and sites of nightlife that traditionally have not been looked at for intellectual life. Baldwin starts with Jack Johnson as a figure who embodied the New Negro because he is examining the mass consumer marketplace as a significant site for the New Negro (p. 5). Jack Johnson defeat of Jeffries meant that scientific theories were challenged, and white supremacy denied. Johnson’s victory lead to race riots and economic losses in the Black community, but Blacks actually retaliated and fought back collectively. These acts of resistance resembled the New Negro spirit that Baldwin examined. Baldwin continues to argue that, “to place a Chicago migrant and mass cultural icon like Johnson at the center of the ‘New Negro’ movement forces a serious rethinking of the relationship between consumer culture and intellectual life” (p.5). This “rethinking” enables a full understanding of the New Negro experience.
Alain Locke interpretation of the New Negro does not include the working-class members that were not part of the so called elite group of intellectuals. Locke focused more on the artistic self-expression of the New Negro. The book emphasized the achievements of Blacks in the arts and focused on the New Negro experience as a cultural revolution taking place out of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Locke and Baldwin expressed that Black business and Black entrepreneurs were a symbol or race pride and embodied the New Negro. For example, Madame C.J. Walker beauty enterprise emphasized race pride and respectability. Locke emphasized that part of the New Negro identity was uplifting the Black race and keeping their respectability or dignity. Furthermore, both men understood that part of the New Negro experience was to challenge the ideas of beauty which revolved around the emulation of White beauty standards. Furthermore, Locke expressed that the spirit of African expressions and art was disciplined and sophisticated. He expressed artists should gain the “lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery” (The New Negro, p. 256). In Chicago’s New Negroes, Baldwin expressed how within the beauty culture Blacks were able to create their own discipline and style for beauty that represented the New Negro.
I agree with your analysis of Baldwin’s interpretation of the New Negro. He did believe that “musicians, beauty culturists, athletes, gamblers, and film directors were all part of Chicago’s New Negro.” It seems to me that Baldwin thought that blacks who had a particular skill could be seen as the New Negro. The New Negro was seen everywhere if you paid close attention. While Locke on the other hand believed that blacks needed to be educationally sound in order to lift the black race. Again if you look at my blog, I summarized the life of Alain Locke. His success growing up laid the foundation for his ideas about the New Negro vs. the Old Negro. The only people who could challenge the ideas of white supremacy are those intellectual individuals and creative minds. I could be wrong, but this is how I personally view Alain Locke interpretation of the New Negro.
ReplyDeleteLooking at how the black community achieved a level of the New Negro spirit by fighting back and through conscious consumerism, I appreciate Baldwin's work for expanding the limited work of the New Negro. As We can see through Locke's text, much of the geographic focus of the New Negro resides in Harlem. However,Baldwin expands our knowledge of the New Negro to incorporate the success of his entrepreneurship in Chicago. In previous courses I have studied the impact that CJ Walker has made on her community through beauty business. The philosophy of racial pride and challenging white assimilation through the business realm is one that deserves more attention. That being said, it is still important to acknowledge the importance of Harlem to the New Negro. The art and creative ways that the New Negro has been able to progress and unify as a community is significant in the development of the New Negro's self-respecting and uplifting consciousness.
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