Langston Hughes
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
"Harlem as a site of the black cultural
sublime was invented by writers and artists determined to transform the
stereotypical image of Negro Americans at the turn of the century away from
their popular image as ex-slaves, as members of a race inherently inferior inferior - biologically and environmentally unfitted for
mechanized modernity and its cosmopolitan forms of fluid identity - into an
image of a race of cultural bearers. To effect this transformation, a 'New
Negro' was called for - quite urgently, many black intellectuals felt- and this
New Negro would need a nation over which to preside. And that nation's capital
would be Harlem, that realm north of
"In a 1925 essay entitled 'The New Negro', Howard University Professor of Philosophy Alain Locke described this transformation as not relying on older time-worn models but, rather, embracing a 'new psychology' and 'new sprit'. Central to Locke's prescription was the mandate that the 'New Negro' had to 'smash' all of the racial, social and psychological impediments that had long obstructed black achievement. Six years prior to Locke's essay, the pioneering black film maker Oscar Micheaux called for similar changes. In his film Within our Gates, Micheaux represented a virtual cornucopia of 'New Negro' types: from the educated and entrepreneurial 'race' man and woman to the incorrigible Negro hustler, from the liberal white philanthropist to the hard core white racist. Micheaux created a complex, melodramatic narrative around these types in order to develop a morality tale of pride, prejudice, misanthropy and progressivism
Examples
Art: Aaron Douglas
Poetry: Langston Hughes