The New Negro Movement and the African Heritage in A Pan-Africanist Perspective

Abstract

As stereotypes of Africa continue to overflow today's film industry in crude and in subtle forms, following very much the fluctuations of the American and European demand for safari/Tarzan adventure, the necessity of comprehending the idea and function of Africa in the works and lives of some of the pioneers of Black pride consciousness imposes itself. The deep sociocultural reality commonly referred to as the African heritage was often despised if not simply unacknowledged throughout slavery by White mainstream culture and Black leaders seeking emancipation and integration for Blacks, as we will examine further. The era of the Harlem Renaissance reversed some of the negative connotations attached to Africa, although we do find Black precursors of a distinctive racial art and history in the 19th century. The new Negro Movement and Pan-Africanism were the two predominant cultural forces of the Harlem Renaissance that initiated the first official rehabilitation of African and Black American cultures in the New World. My approach presents socioliterary interpretations of the African heritage in works of that era while placing them in the broader context of Pan-Africanist studies. Interestingly, most of our ideas on the African heritage emanate from texts that do not fit within the classical landmarks of 1920 to 1930-for instance, Martin Delany's (1879) The Principle of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, W. E. B. DuBois' (1903, 1940) The Souls of Black Folks and Dusk of Dawn, Alain Leroy Locke's (1936) Negro Art: Past