Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
produced that year for hurling “shell, bomb and shrapnel at the citadel of Nordicism.”46 The second of this two-part article was published a month later, and in it Locke argues that sociology and, even more importantly, anthropology have set their sights on “Nordicism” through “scientific encirclement and bombardment.”47 The appeal of Boas’s assault on scientific racism is clearly articulated by Locke, but his review also makes clear the point at which the New Negro agenda began to diverge from that of Boas’s own, namely in Locke’s unabashed enthusiasm for the notion that the social sciences might be used as an instrument in the service of social reform, as a weapon to combat White supremacy. Boas’s anti-racist, liberal politics were certainly well known, as he did not hesitate to voice them in conversations, letters, and essays written for popular publication. Yet he also resisted the politicization of scholarship such as that suggested by Locke in “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism.” Boas considered objectivity a necessary prerequisite for academics to maintain their integrity. Baker astutely notes, however, that New Negro intellectuals’ keen awareness of the “racial politics of culture” made them less wary than Boas of using anthropology to try to reform social attitudes about race:
Schomburg, Fauset, Hurston, Woodson, and to a certain extent Locke pressed into service the liberal politics, relativistic orientation, and credentials of anthropologists who limited their exploration of African American culture to research and academic journals. Although the intellectuals of the movement were always careful scientists and historians or creative artists and performers, they were clear that scholarship and performance by and about black people involved political stakes that were entwined and woven into the very fabric of the movement to transform race relations and the meaning of being black in America. (Baker, “Research” 74)
The New Negro intellectuals’ investment in a collective project of social reform, their exploration of the limits and possibilities in racial solidarity, and their celebration of “race consciousness” are all areas where they diverge from Boas’s application of his theories on race and culture; yet, they were indebted to Boasian anthropology for the concepts, vocabulary, and the modes of representation that they used to advance their agenda of racial reform and uplift through artistic achievement.48
This agenda led Arthur Fauset (novelist Jessie Fauset’s brother), for example, to underscore the African origins of Negro folklore, and to argue that both varieties of tales were endowed with the same fundamental traits of “human kinship and universality.”49 The building blocks of race pride can be ascertained in his declaration that, alluding to Aesop’s fabled African origins, “Africa in a sense is the home of the fable; the African tales are its classics” (243). Fauset was a highly trained and rigorous folklorist whose orientation reflected the ideology of the American Folklore Society’s leaders. He shunned literary embellishment of folk materials, for example, and privileged authentic recreation as opposed to interpretation. Thus Fauset minimized the role of the storyteller in his presentation of the folktale, arguing, “as in the case of all true folk tales, the story teller himself was inconsequential; he did not figure at all—a talking machine might serve the purpose just as well” (240). Certainly, there are differences that can be ascertained among the stances and approaches taken by the various New Negro intellectuals. A figure like Hurston was supremely unconcerned with the blurring of disciplinary and generic boundaries, whereas Sterling Brown can be aligned with Fauset because he too, insisted (this time from a poet’s point of view) that literature not be confused with sociological materials.
Writers and intellectuals like these found numerous points of engagement with folklore, anthropology, and ethnography, yet they did not always feel compelled to follow the proscribed methods of these disciplines because their aims differed from that of Boas and his students, who set out to redefine culture. As Lee Baker astutely observes, the New Negro intellectuals emphasized, in addition, the racial politics of culture (From Savage to Negro 168–87). Boas viewed relativism, for example, as a means of enhancing the fieldworker’s objectivity while conducting research, not as an instrument for promoting racial or cultural pride. But Black intellectuals used the nonhierarchical, relativistic view of culture to formulate and articulate a discrete “race consciousness” that bound Black people together through their common heritage in Africa and shared goals of social advancement and emancipation. According to Baker, “Artists and intellectuals turned to the blues and spirituals, holiness churches and ring shouts, as well as other traditional cultural practices to offer an empowering way to transform segregation into a form of congregation by challenging the derogatory assessments that the culture of rural Negroes was backward and inferior” (“Research” 73). But in “The Mind of Primitive Man,” published in the Journal of American FolkLore, Boas explained how a relativist orientation was best suited for use in the field: “the student must endeavor to divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into which he is born. He must adapt his own mind, so far as feasible, to that of the people whom he is studying. The more successful he is in freeing himself from the bias based on the group of ideas that constituted the civilization in which he lives, the more successful he will be in interpreting the beliefs and actions of man.”50 The connections between Boas’s theories and his desire for social justice are obvious. Nonetheless, he treated with suspicion attempts at merging scholarship with social reform because he feared losing his objectivity. Thus he preferred to write dispassionate reports on fieldwork to anything that suggested propaganda.51
Because Boas believed that African American’s cultural assimilation would contribute to the resolution of the race problem in the United States, he was “absolutely opposed to all kinds of attempts to foster racial solidarity” (cited in Baker, “Research” 72).52 This conviction may have grown from his own experiences growing up as a secular Jew in Germany. Since the late eighteenth century, German Jews had expressed a desire for, and had achieved, social advancement and integration by assimilating economically, and to a lesser extent socially and culturally, into the larger society. The diminishment of religious tradition and observance was one consequence of this process.53 Yet the possibility for integration was not at all obvious for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction Era and early decades of the twentieth century. That period ushered in a multitude of instances of systemic racial violence and exclusion including the eruption of lynching incidents and race riots against African American communities, the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation, and the wholesale disenfranchisement of Blacks from civic life, all of which made the goal of integration seem unlikely and the need for racial solidarity all the more necessary.
W. E. B. Du Bois, another, equally influential figure in the study of race and culture, keenly understood this. Like Boas, Du Bois was instrumental in the formation of a discipline in its modern form, namely sociology; and he made critical theoretical interventions in conceptualizations of race and culture at a pivotal point in the formation of the discipline. Unlike Boas, his influence is not always accepted as incontrovertible fact. Lee Baker, Faye V. Harrison, and Irene Diggs argue that although Boas’s institutional base in the academy afforded him the opportunity to “redirect scientific approaches to race,” other more marginalized scholars, like Du Bois, anticipated and even influenced Boas’s scholarship.54 Baker argues, for example, that Du Bois’s early understanding of the color line contributed to the culture concept by distinguishing between “the cultural aspects of race and the social relations of race.” In his 1897 paper “The Conservation of Races,” presented at the first meeting of the Negro Academy, Du Bois argued that despite the existence of racial differences, “when we thus come to inquire into the essential difference of races we find it hard to come at once to any definite conclusion.”55 The reason Du Bois gave—that more differences exist within individual racial groups than between the different races—anticipates Boas’s theory of diffusion.56 Yet Du Bois’s seminal role in modern American constructs of culture is often overlooked because he lacked the institutional power and authority that Boas possessed as a White scientist who was viewed as objective, and who held influential posts on editorial boards and in a prestigious department in the Academy.57
In the following chapter, I will discuss Du Bois’s significance as a cultural and intellectual patriarch on New Negro artists and authors. His early career illustrates the many similarities