Loading...
New Negro replacements: How the Harlem Renaissance challenged rival portrayals of black identity
Mosley, Peter Elisha
Mosley, Peter Elisha
Citations
Altmetric:
Soloist
Composer
Publisher
Date
2016
Additional date(s)
Abstract
Harlem Renaissance portrayals of the New Negro are rarely compared to the portraits of blackness in novels written outside the movement, although these are the portraits Harlem Renaissance leaders claimed a desire to correct. This dissertation was written to address this deficiency in the scholarship by putting novels written by the Harlem Renaissance authors Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, and W.E.B. Du Bois in conversation with works by Willa Cather and William Faulkner that depict prominent portrayals of black identity, before comparing Harlem Renaissance thought to the expressions of Richard Wright¿s Native Son, which is widely seen as the novel that ended the New Negro movement. My investigation centers on the Harlem Renaissance figure of the New Negro as a prototype of black dignity and respectability, connecting it to several images of blackness in Cather and Faulkner to uncover several tensions between blackness and whiteness, between religious expression and nonreligious expression, between ruralization and urbanization, between ideals of gender and portrayals of grim realities in experiencing gender, between internationalism and nationalism, and between the nature of past experiences and present needs. Several of these tensions invoke prototypical characters in the novels this study examines, opening up ways of responding to these tensions that challenge assumptions that are prominent in the most dominant texts on blackness written in the first half of the twentieth century. The study ends with the argument that Bigger Thomas is a decisive break with the more diplomatic approach that had been associated with extolling a New Negro figure, concluding that the current need for diplomatic approaches to race discussions can be partially addressed by retroactively putting such texts in conversation with the prominent American writers they are often taught in isolation from, as many of these Harlem Renaissance texts were originally crafted to perform this work.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Genre
Dissertation
Description
Format
Department
English