Alain Locke: Culture and the Plurality of Black Life

ALAIN LOCKE: CULTURE AND THE PLURALITY OF BLACK LIFE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School Of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Michelle Renée Smith August 2009 © 2009 Michelle Renée Smith ALAIN LOCKE: CULTURE AND THE PLURALITY OF BLACK LIFE Michelle Renée Smith, Ph.D. Cornell University 2009 Better representation of ‘the black’ and of ‘black life’ in ‘public’ and recognition of black culture are often assumed to be necessary parts of any political project on behalf of black people. Major black artists and black artistic movements are, therefore, commonly understood to re-represent black identity and, through their renovation of ‘blackness,’ to justify black participation in public life. This dissertation investigates the writings of the black philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke. In a series of inter-related essays that both situate Locke in a particular context (by examining his relationships to his contemporaries) and bring his work into conversation with current debates in political theory (by comparing/contrasting his theorizations of race and culture with those of contemporary theorists), I suggest that Locke’s critical approach to ‘black’ artwork was novel because it refused to demand that artwork renovate black life or reduce its variety to a black identity worthy of recognition. While Locke’s refusal to pursue better representations of blackness has been, in some circles, called ‘naïve’ and ‘a- political,’ I argue that Locke’s criticism of art is informed by a rich and subtle theorization of ‘race’ as an identity-producing center of meaning and of ‘race thinking’ as a particular form of ‘dogmatism,’ which prevents both intellectual and political democracy. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Michelle Renée Smith was born in Cleveland, OH in 1974, the eldest daughter of Cathy and George and sister of April. She has (thus far) lived in eight, mostly northeastern states and Berlin, Germany. Michelle majored in Africana Studies and minored in Political Science at Rutgers College. Her undergraduate honors thesis was entitled “(Re)defining Black Identity: Reading Zora Neale Hurston.“After receiving her B.A. degree in 1997, Michelle worked for The Princeton Review, Prudential, Microsoft and Amazon.com before deciding to pursue graduate study in Political Theory. She received her M.A. in Government from Cornell University in 2006. Michelle taught college level courses at Auburn Prison, Auburn, NY and is a founding member of the Cornell Prison Education Board. Beginning in Fall 2009, Michelle will be an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at University of Florida. iii For my spring 2009 students at Auburn Prison, Nafis, Un, Kenneth, Mesiah, Kalico, L.Z., Jamey, T.S., Born, Café, Shakem, Jihad, Sky, Equality, Jamel, Reese and K.C. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee, Professors Isaac Kramnick, Richard Bensel, Jason Frank, Susan Buck-Morss and Anna Marie Smith for their thoughtful advice and encouragement, Professor Mary Katzenstein for inviting me to teach in and learn about Auburn Prison, my parents Cathy and George Smith and my sister April Smith for their love and support, and my many friends at Cornell and in Ithaca and from my Microsoft and Princeton Review days, who have buoyed my spirit along the way. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Chapter 1. Introduction 1 I. Biography of Alain Locke 6 II. Self-expression, Culture and the Politics of Recognition 13 III. Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance 21 IV. Chapter Breakdown 28 Chapter 2. All That’s Solid: Difference, Race, and ‘the Political’ 39 I. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations 46 II. Race and Modernity 59 III. ‘The Racial’ as ‘the Political’ 66 Chapter 3. Culture and the Poetry of ‘Negro’ Life 74 I. Locke, Identity and Recognition 78 II. Social Culture/Cultivation 84 III. Simmel and Locke: Synthesis and the Poetry of ‘Negro’ Life 93 Chapter 4. Modern (‘Negro’) Poetry 110 I. Black Modernity: Internationalism and the ‘Practice of Diaspora’ 112 II. “Really Vital Modernism” 119 III. “The Travail and Destiny of an Age” 133 Chapter 5. “[We] Are Not a Race Problem” 145 I. The Great Debate 149 II. In Pursuit of Proselytes, In Pursuit of Art: Du Bois and Locke on the Function of Art 156 III. Representation or Expressiveness: The Drama of Negro Life 171 Chapter 6. “To Usward” 184 I. “To Usward” 187 II. “Jingo, Counter-Jingo and Us” 199 Chapter 7. Conclusion 205 I. Future Directions 211 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ALAIN LOCKE, THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE PLURALITY OF BLACK LIFE Something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro and the three Norns1 [the Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race-leader] who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem have a changeling in their laps.... the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life... But while the minds of most of us, black and white, have thus burrowed in the trenches of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the actual march of development has simply flanked these positions, necessitating a sudden reorientation of view. We have not been watching in the right direction; set North and South on a sectional axis, we have not noticed the East till the sun has us blinking.2 I. Scope and Objectives This dissertation examines how Alain Locke, the philosopher and art critic best known as the chief interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement and editor of its preeminent text, The New Negro: an Interpretation, articulated the plurality of black life in his art and literary criticism. Locke argued that ‘race’ and ‘race-thinking’ had ascribed a false identity to black people, which foreclosed the recognition of black plurality. He saw in “modernity” hints that black people were abandoning this falsely ascribed identity in favor of self-expressiveness and argued that the artistic products of self-expression would enter the cosmopolitan realm of culture, where they 1 Norns are goddesses who rule the fates in Norse mythology. Locke’s use of “Norns” here is interesting, for it suggests that until the advent of the Harlem Renaissance, certain modes of thinking and practice—the ‘knowledge’ of black life provided by the social sciences, the (perhaps questionable) patronage of white philanthropists and political leadership based on the racial identification of the group—had determined the circumstances of black people. During the Harlem Renaissance period, Locke suggests, something new was afoot that even the best science, the most generous gifts and the most familiar political practices failed to adequately understand or benefit from. Artwork, Locke makes clear in the essays he wrote for the New Negro: an Interpretation, captured these changes. 2 Alain Locke, The New Negro: an Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925) 1 would serve as sources of self-cultivation for all people. I want to suggest that Locke’s primary significance to (black) political thought is that he envisioned the “black imagination” freed of the misrepresentations of the past without imposing what I see as a new constraint— a reconstituted black identity that was to arise from black art. In part, this is because though Locke recognized the negative impact of racism and ‘race thinking’ on the black imagination, he did not suggest that these effects could be repaired by recourse to a new identity or by public recognition of black culture. Rather, with time, new forms of group relations arise. The constellation of developments, events and ideas that was ‘modernity’ would usher in the possibility of ‘expression’ in black Americans and the influence of ‘race theory and thinking’ would wane. Locke suggested that black artists were becoming liberated from externally imposed expectations of black art and, just as important, from the social and political duty to represent ‘the race.’ Against W.E.B. Du Bois among others, Locke insisted that black artists (and for that matter, white artists who depicted black life) should neither serve political objectives in artwork, nor be forced to portray black people positively. Writing about and on behalf of black artists, Locke refused the responsibilities and limits of politics in artwork in favor of ‘expression.’ He argued that the purpose of black artwork was not to correct white supremacist misrepresentations of black life or history or to ‘demonstrate’ that black people were, in fact, worthy of social and political inclusion. (That he took for granted, just as he should have.) Rather, Locke thought that (black) artwork should be “expressive of” ‘Negro life,’ in all its variety and vitality. Expressiveness was for Locke the mark of the most successful modern art. 2 But Locke did not ‘demand’ autonomy for black artists. Rather he observed its expression in contemporary black artwork and exhorted black artists to pursue it. Several indicators attracted Locke’s attention: in poetry, writers turned from argument and exhortation to (self and group) representativeness, taking advantage of modern developments in poetic form: From the bathos of sentimental appeal and the postures of moralizing protest, Negro poets have risen to the dignity and poise of self-expression. Freed from the limitations of dialect that made the technique of the nursery rhyme tolerable, they have

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