Politics and Institution Building in the New Negro Renaissance Anthologies
Politics and Institution Building in the New Negro Renaissance Compiled for the 2010 NEH Summer Institute at Washington University in St. Louis Emily Bono, Shawn Hornung, Joe Hunter, Lenard Jackson Erin Lynch, Antwayn Patrick, Petra Riviere, Joe Regenbogen Anthologies: Brown, Tamara L., Gregory S. Parks, and Clarenda M. Phillips, ed. African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds. The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. This extensive collection of essays is a valuable, foundational tool for those wishing to understand the intellectual movement for racial uplift that sought to redefine/recreate and promote a new African-American identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The New Negro Movement sought to replace the Old Negro identity, tied to slavery, minstrelsy, subservience and lynching, with a new identity of race pride, economic success, artistic prowess and political equality—the New Negro. The editors state, “By reprinting approximately one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays written or published between 1892 and 1938, we lay the groundwork for scholars, teachers, students, and general readers to learn more about the political interconnection of race, representation and African American culture.” The essays are written by a wide array of intellectuals for whom the meaning and significance of art, culture, and politics were incontrovertibly tied to racial representation. The editors’ introductory comments provide an overview of the movement’s main themes as well as a guide to the structure and content of the collection.
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