After winnning a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his 2018 biography of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart continues his study of the groundbreaking Howard University scholar as the editor of Alain Locke, The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings, a new collection of Locke’s classic essays and reviews, out now from Penguin Classics.
A scholar, educator, and influential patron of the arts, Alain Locke (1885-1954) is a giant of 20th century Black American intellectual acheivement and a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of Black arts activities of all kinds during the 1920s. Locke graduated from Harvard University in 1907 with degrees in English and philosophy; later receiving a PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. He was named chair of the philosophy department at Howard University the same year.
Stewart, professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Alain Locke: The New Negro, which was awarded the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, among other literary prizes. This new collection, edited by Stewart under the general series supervision of scholar Henry Louis Gates, features forty of Locke’s essays and reviews on African American literature, race, culture, theater, music and the visual arts. PW talked with Stewart about the genesis and breadth of Locke’s aesthetic ideas, and how they influenced Black people and the world.
Publishers Weekly: What inspired you to put this compendium together?
Jeffrey Stewart: I have to give some credit here to [general editor] Henry Louis Gates, because he was the one who actually came to me and said, hey, have you thought about doing a volume on Locke’s aesthetic writings? How would you put that together? So I started thinking about that.
Locke wrote, “the Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him.” The concept of the New Negro is central to Locke. Where did it come from?
The term was around, all the way back into the 1880s and 1890s. Black people were using that term as a post-reconstruction, post-slavery identity. Locke was invested with this particular aesthetic notion that the new Negro is a person aware of her or his brilliant gift: The Gift of Black Folk, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it. And The Gift of Black Folk is our art. And so, the New Negro became the focal point for my organizing the book.
How does Locke advance his aesthetic conception of The New Negro?
Locke launched The New Negro as an aesthetic formation. He almost curated the term, like he was the Godfather of that concept, and he shepherded that concept through the late 1920s, into the thirties, forties, and even in the 1950s. There’s a wonderful essay in Locke’s retrospective reviews, which I put in the book called “The Negro: "New" or Newer". He was still riffing on this idea of newness. And I thought, well, why is that? Because I think Locke has this concept of reinvention.
That is at the heart of The New Negro. Locke sees that Black people have this phenomenal capacity to reinvent themselves. That's why I [used the term] iterative African Americans in the back of the book. We're constantly updating ourselves. We invent the spirituals. And then, 40 or 50 years later, we invent the blues. And then 34 years later, we invent jazz. We invent swing, we invent bebop, black rock and roll, rhythm and blues, hip hop … Locke saw that ability in Black people to reinvent themselves as an identity.
In an excerpt from Locke’s “The Negro and his Music,” he praises jazz musicians as, “pathfinders into new realms,” but also critiques the “cheap low brow jazz that is manufactured for passing musical comsumption.”
I think he was conflicted about it. Many of those 19th century Black Victorians had been weaned on classical music. And so his taste was not really sympathetic to those forms of jazz that come out of ragtime in the 1920s. But once jazz moved into the early swing movement [of the 1930s] with Duke Ellington, who studied classical music, and basically essentially created what Locke called a form of classical jazz, that obviously drew him in.
I think by the time of the 1930s, he was really listening much more carefully. And he was beginning to make connections between what was happening in jazz, and what was happening in the spirituals, which is really the form of music he loved the most. He was beginning to see that there was jazz built on many of the choral elements in Black music which had been so innovated by people in the Black churches, in a way that was different from people who trace the history of jazz, from the bordellos in New Orleans. I also feel that if Locke had lived longer into the early 1960s, he would have been a tremendous fan of the way Miles Davis approached jazz, particularly in his cool phase. I think he would have perhaps even had more to say about jazz.
Duke Ellington described jazz as a “music with an African foundation, which came out of an American environment." Locke was interested in the African foundation of the New Negro in a hemispheric context in his lecture/essay, “The Negro in the Three Americas.” Would you classify him as a pan-Africanist, understanding the global cultural connections between people of African descent?
Yes, very much so! When Locke was invited to give those lectures in Haiti, during the 1940s, he looked at how African culture—Black aesthetic intelligence—took the English traditions in North America, the French traditions obviously in Haiti, and the Spanish and Portuguese traditions throughout Latin America, and made something new. And Locke was really trying to get a conversation [started] between the Caribbean, Latin America and North America around those [cultural] similarities and differences, which has never actually taken place. And I think it would be a wonderful thing if this essay sparked that conversation.
Which one of Locke’s essays stand out to you?
I think “Harlem” is one of Locke’s most profound essays, in terms of the sociology of aesthetic formation. He shows the migration of working class Black people into Harlem, and the connection that was fused between the artists and the students. The heterogeneity of Harlem is what led to the Harlem Renaissance. In America, we really fight against diversity. Locke is saying it's the diversity within the Black community that produces the spectacular brilliance of Harlem.
In other words: In our modern era, part of the unfinished revolution of the New Negro movement is to continue to create spaces where it can thrive.
Locke was saying, we need a space for art: an enabling place, where working class people, the criminal, the artists, the activists and the students come together. And through their interaction, there is a great race welding. I think that concept is really the concept for the whole book.
