Reviewed by: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart Jovonna Jones The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. By Jeffrey C. Stewart. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 944 pp. Illustrations, notes, select bibliography, index. $39.95.) "I am not a race problem," the first African American Rhodes scholar wrote to his mother back home in Philadelphia (105). The budding philosopher Alain Locke had just won the prestigious award during his final year at Harvard College in 1907. But he felt burdened by the task to represent the race. He resented black organizations across the East Coast who claimed his win as their own and the northern white newspapers who lauded him as an example of proper racial progress. "I am Alain LeRoy Locke," he declared in his letter, "and if these people don't stop I'll tell them something that will make them" (105). [End Page 226] Jeffrey C. Stewart has carefully mined Alain Locke's personal papers at Howard University to illustrate a complex portrait of the intellectual leader. The biography is organized in three major parts: "The Education of Alain Locke," "Enter the New Negro," and "Metamorphosis," each constructed through short episodic chapters. All episodes provide a detailed look into how Locke's philosophy of black aesthetics developed, from the domestic adornments of black Victorianism performed by his mother at the turn of the century, to the problem of the "primitive" and the "folk" in Western modernism, to the fight for more institutions and criticism to support black artists into the postwar period. One of the more refreshing contributions of this biography is Stewart's return to Locke's famed New Negro philosophy in the context of a more complicated psychic milieu. The New Negro philosophy—a charge to eclipse stereotypes and struggle with complexity and pleasure—was Locke's way of advocating for aesthetics in the world of black intellectualism and white patronage. The New Negro provided a framework for a spiritual and political engagement with black arts and letters so that a new generation of artists—like Locke's mentees and students Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston—could be received and supported in their full complexity with blackness as their inspiration, not as a problem to be solved. If W. E. B Du Bois wanted art to be used as propaganda for "gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy," Alain Locke, as Stewart writes, "wanted a drama that showed Black folk could already love and enjoy despite the terror of racism" (277, italics my own). Du Bois's approach was ultimately compromised by his condescension toward the black masses and toward artists deemed too risky for the racial cause. Locke's ideology held its own conflicts, too. His approach to art and life appeared exploitative and contradictory, informed by a colonial obsession with African artifacts and a cultural claim to tradition yet driven by a cosmopolitan desire for pure, ahistorical forms. But Locke's true impulse behind the New Negro often defied the political and intellectual discourse of the time, perhaps strategically so. Locke already knew what it felt like to balance respectability and transgression in his own life. As a black gay man long affirmed and cautioned by his doting mother, Locke was keenly aware of the constraints upon his freedom to experience intimacy and inspiration without the threat of being ostracized due to race and sexuality. Locke desired from black aesthetics the grammars and spaces to live the full breadth of his desires, fears, and experiences. This quality made him not only a leader of thought but a mentor who could see and affirm the black artists working the same vein. "I supposed some of us erotic lads," the budding poet Countee Cullen wrote in a letter to his new mentor Locke, "were placed here just to eat our hearts out with longing for unattainable things, especially for that friendship beyond understanding." Locke and Cullen both desired a freedom possible not through [End Page 227] political discourse or even through social acceptance but through a black art of living on new terms—sometimes unspeakable terms—that...