Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
social sciences’ emphasis on fieldwork as a fundamental mode of inquiry established the notion of “the field” as isolated, set apart, and uncorrupted by outside communities.23 Yet we should not attribute the place of the South in the Renaissance imagination solely to this fact. Because the Southern Black Belt is a central site of analysis for Du Bois he, as much as a figure like Boas, influenced Harlem Renaissance constructions of New Negro identity in relation to the Southern past. Alain Locke extends Du Bois’s thesis when he argues in “The New Negro,” for example, for the recognition of more progressive, assertive, and urban identified Negro, whose advancement was tied to a revaluation of the artistic and cultural roles Southern Blacks have played in the regional and national scenes. What was needed, in other words, for the advancement of the race, was a reassessment of the value of the culture from which it was born:
It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of American which most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source. (15)
Locke’s identification of the Southern “folk” as a point of orientation for the creation of an African American expressive culture corresponds with and is informed by a period in which Black writers absorbed the idea of the “field” as apart from the real and modern present because of their ethnographic training and/or interests.24 In fact, Du Bois’s representation of the Southern Black Belt anticipates the New Negro consumption of anthropological concepts when, in The Souls of Black Folk, he describes a Southern town as a product of the imagination of modern, urbanized Northerners:
Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life so little that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the world has well nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of sand and gloomy soil. (442)
When writing from a distance, whether geographic or experiential, Du Bois suggests descriptions of the other inevitably leave something lacking because the writer endows them with characteristics of the familiar, or relies on easy stereotype. The city dweller, he implies, may aspire to represent “country life,” but her or she may only be able to imagine a “little city” in which the relational geography assumes the characteristics of life in an urban setting, while at the same time imposing on the landscape stock features of associated with the rural: cotton, corn, and gloomy soil.
The irony is that while Du Bois certainly emphasizes the isolation of Southern towns because of historical circumstances (namely racial segregation), he also stressed its status as an ideal study site because the advent of emancipation allowed for the rapid social transformation of a once oppressed group of individuals. In “The Atlanta Conferences” (1904), for example, he wrote:
The careful exhaustive study of the isolated group then is the ideal of the sociologist of the 20th century—from that may come a real knowledge of natural law as locally manifest—a glimpse and revelation of rhythm beyond this little center at last careful, cautious generalization and formulation. For such work there lies before the sociologist of the Untied States a peculiar opportunity. We have here going on before our eyes the evolution of a vast group of men from simpler primitive conditions to higher more complex civilization. (reprinted in Green and Driver 54)
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