Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
will be the relation between the races” (25).
It may seem contradictory, given these beliefs, that Boas publicly urged African Americans to recognize and harness the greatness of their African past. But the vindication of that heritage was necessary for the cultivation of ideas of social equality between the races which might then lead to the wholesale assimilation that Boas predicted. In “Industries of the African Negro,” he asserted, “this loss of connection with the historic past is without doubt one of the most degrading influences in human culture.”34 The argument was accompanied by numerous illustrations of African artistic and industrial achievement culled from the African and South Pacific Collections of the Royal Ethnographical Museum of Berlin, such as pottery, ornately decorated weapons, and elaborate wood carvings. If American Negroes failed to achieve similar accomplishments, their social and cultural disintegration could be attributed to European influences. “Their former activities disappeared, and a new kind of work was forced upon them that had no relation to their inner life” (222). Boas, using a vocabulary that would resonate with an audience conditioned by the industrial school system to appreciate the improvability of the African American, asserts, “industrious life reigns throughout the [typical African] village” (224). A deeper awareness of African industriousness would reveal various African societies’ concern with the manufacture of useful goods and textiles, with a social cohesion and organization that were dependent on the equitable dispensation of justice, and with beauty, among other laudable qualities.
In a May 30, 1906 commencement address at Atlanta University entitled “The Outlook of the American Negro,” delivered at the invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois, Boas encouraged the gathered students to strive for a level of achievement similar to that reached by their African ancestors:
If, therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently look to the home of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored people the strength that was their own before they set foot on the shores of this continent. You may say that you go to work with bright hopes, and that you will not be discouraged by the slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost in transplanting the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your ancestors had ever attained.35
Critics frequently cite Du Bois’s reference to this address in Black Folks Then and Now (1939) as evidence of Boas’s influence on him. Du Bois wrote, “Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching history in 1906 and said to a graduating class: ‘You need not be ashamed of your African past’ and then he recounted the history of the Black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be consciously distorted.”36 George Hutchinson cites this as one example of the existence of often overlooked interracial networks of American modernist intellectual exchange during the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that the connections between Boasian anthropology, pragmatism, and the Harlem Renaissance illustrate a “confluence of [these] communities of interpretation’ [that offer] a model of the sort of effective interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange to which many academic intellectuals today aspire.”37 Moreover, he makes a case for Boas’s influence in establishing the institutional and intellectual context in which the Renaissance imagination flourished.38 In a similar vein, Vernon Williams argues that Black intellectuals found affinity with the anthropological principle that social differences had cultural and not racial explanations; and as they adapted this theory to their own work, they passed on Boas’s legacy of progressive, egalitarian politics (4).
The Politics of Influence
Boas and his students mounted an assault on racism by articulating a theory of multiple “cultures” in place of a unified, vertically stratified “Culture,” and by insisting that cultures be judged from within their own relative value systems.39 This “culture concept” contributed to an ideology of cultural pluralism to which Harlem Renaissance figures found themselves drawn.40 Boasian anthropology’s presence can also be felt in the self-reflexivity of New Negro literature, in the writers’ assumptions that tradition is dynamic and that culture is always changing and adapting to circumstance, and in the assumption that indigenous peoples are subjects and collaborators, not mere objects for study.41 It is a common feature of Harlem Renaissance criticism to note that writers worked from the assumption that Southern slave culture was dying due to the post-emancipation period’s growing modernization and urbanization.42 Hurston, for example, writing to Franz Boas in 1927, emphasized the urgency of collecting folklore at that historical juncture, telling him, “It is fortunate that it is being collected now, for a great many people say, ‘I used to know some of that old stuff, but I done forgot it all.’ You see, the negro is not living his lore to the extent of the Indian. He is not on a reservation, being kept pure. His negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.”43 Even this ethic was informed by what Marc Manganaro, referencing James Clifford, calls the anthropological “allegory of salvage.”44
This allegory of salvage lies in tension with the simultaneous awareness that culture persists in mutable and adaptable forms. Both Du Bois and Hurston, for example, represent Southern communities as heterogeneous and fluid in some instances, while in others they ascribe to a depiction of the Black Southern culture as a relic of the past, or in Hurston’s case, privilege ideas of Negro culture that stress its authenticity and purity from outside contract. Paying sustained attention to these emphases cultivates in their readers an acute awareness of the discursive and symbolic uses to which the New Negro put constructions of the South. For example, in “The New Negro,” Alain Locke described the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North as a “deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern” (6). By relegating the South to medieval times, Locke signals its ultimate demise, a figuration that, one could argue, is necessary for the very constitution of a Harlem Renaissance. In other words, it is through the identification of “there and then” as backward that New Negro intellectuals could establish their “here and now” as progressive and forward-looking. Consequently, they took on a multilayered project: to document the cultural transformation that was occurring at the turn of the century, to preserve the remnants of what they perceived as a dying slave culture, and to interrogate the dynamics between the New Negro intellectual, the dominant culture, and the Black subjects of their art. Boasian anthropology—and by this I mean the intellectual tradition produced and practiced by Boas and his students—played an important role in this social and intellectual movement.
Because of their enthusiastic reception of social science theories, Black intellectuals played an active role in the Journal of American Folklore (JAFL) during the Renaissance years. For example, between 1917 and 1937, the JAFL dedicated fourteen issues, known as the “Negro Numbers,” to African American folklore. JAFL editors actively courted New Negro intellectuals like Arthur Huff Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, and Carter G. Woodson, who all contributed to the journal (Baker, From Savage to Negro 144). From its inception in 1888, Baker argues, the JAFL was committed to making African American folklore a central component of the society and its journal. Its initial organization included a department of Negro folklore and its editorial policy dedicated a quarter of the journal’s space to the subject. Newell, the JAFL’s first editor from 1888 to 1900, recruited Alice Bacon and the Hampton Folklore Society in order to get around the blatant racism and unprofessionalism of AFLS’s White southern members (Baker, From Savage to Negro 146). The society’s interest in African American folklore waned after Newell’s departure from his editorial post, but was revived in 1920 when Boas made a determined effort to develop the program in African American folklore and to train Black graduate students.45
The influence of social sciences was widely recognized by Black scholars during the early decades of the twentieth century. For example, Alain Locke, in two 1935 book reviews for the journal Opportunity (both entitled “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism”), links art and the social sciences in their abilities to end ideologies of White supremacy. In the January “retrospective