The making of the new negro: black authorship, masculinity, and sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

Review of Anna Pochmara's The Making of the Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011)The history of African American culture-much like the history of almost any culture developed in, or under the influence of, the West-is dominated by the figures of dead men, who loom over all historical studies with a matter-of-factness that has long remained disconcertingly appropriate. Two strategies are typically employed to interrogate this masculine bias. One consists in the exploration of the under-recorded and often unwritten history of the role women played in the formation of a given culture or movement. Such archaeological works often deliberately set out to tackle the bias by highlighting the ways in which history forgot about the women- as was the case with Rosa Parks, for years remembered almost exclusively as the lady who refused to give up her seat. The other strategy turns the spotlight on the masculine heroes themselves, questioning the rules of the game instead of trying to play it.This is the course Anna Pochmara follows in her study of the origins and development of the idea of the New Negro. Her analysis focuses on how several illustrious Black men of letters involved in the Harlem Renaissance-Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright-dealt with the question of Black manhood in the racist America of the early twentieth century. With this purpose in mind, Pochmara invokes two well-established theoretical paradigms: Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's anxiety of authorship. In the context of a struggle for supremacy in Black American culture,[t]he black male writer is caught in a double bind between the need to engage in heroic warfare with his strong predecessors and the need to establish a legitimate patrilineal lineage, which will both validate black male authorship and set off the specters of social illegitimacy resulting from white men's symbolic and biological fathering of black children. (9-10)In other words, for an early-twentieth-century Black writer to achieve artistic recognition (i.e. find favour with white readers), he was obliged to produce an art that broke with established conventions while paying heed to a certain tradition of Black art.The study opens with an analysis of the relations between Booker T. Washington and W E. B. Du Bois in the context of turn-of-the-century ideas about manliness and masculinity-the transition from the idea of man as the agent of civilization to one of man as the embodiment of virility. According to Pochmara, though Washington pays heed to Victorian values throughout his output, he manages to assert his own masculine privilege in less overt ways, for instance, by citing his popularity as a public speaker among White female audiences. Du Bois, on the other hand, addresses the tension between the two concepts of masculinity more openly. He claims that the racial oppression of Blacks feminizes Black men, enfeebling the Black community. In spite of his firm opposition to Washington's ethics of accommodation, he effectively upholds them by advocating the respectable care of Black men over Black women, claiming manliness while eschewing masculinity.During the interwar years, with Victorian ideas out of favour, respectability lost some of its lustre, while Black male privilege retained virtually all of its allure. Building on the concept of respectable Black masculinity responsible for the uplift of the race, Alain Locke put forward the idea of a New Negro that celebrated the manly vigour of the urban Black. In this context, Pochmara highlights the way in which Locke is positioned not as a father of the New Negro movement-the Harlem Renaissance-but rather as a midwife: a gesture that neatly circumscribes Black womanhood. Her analysis goes even further by identifying the European roots of the movement, traced to both ancient Greece and the more modern Jugendkultur offin-de-siecle Germany. …