The Works of Alain Locke

622 Pages·2012·1.83 MB·English

by  Charles Molesworth

The Works of
AAllaaiinn LLoocckkee
This page intentionally left blank
The Works of
AAllaaiinn LLoocckkee
Edited, with an Introduction by
Charles Molesworth
Foreword by
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Locke, Alain LeRoy, 1886–1954.
[Works. 2012]
The works of Alain Locke / edited by Charles Molesworth ; foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
p. cm.—(The collected Black writings series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-979504-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. 2. African American arts.
3. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 4. African
Americans—Race identity. 5. African Americans—Civil rights. I. Molesworth, Charles, 1941– II. Title.
E185.97.L79A2 2012

191—dc22 2011013073
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
FFoorreewwoorrdd vviiii
IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn xxii
EEddiittoorriiaall NNoottee xxxxxxvviiii
PPaarrtt 11:: LLiitteerraattuurree
Introduction 3
Paul Laurence Dunbar 5
The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats 10
Emile Verhaeren 30
The Colonial Literature of France 37
The Younger Literary Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke 44
Color—A Review 48
The Weary Blues 5 2
Common Clay and Poetry 55
The Poetry of Negro Life 58
American Literary Tradition and the Negro 60
Fire: A Negro Magazine 66
The Message of The Negro Poets 68
Foreword to A n Autumn Love Cycle, by Georgia Douglas Johnson 79
Both Sides of the Color Line 81
The Negro Minority in American Literature 83
PPaarrtt 22:: AArrtt,, DDrraammaa,, aanndd MMuussiicc
Introduction 91
Steps Toward the Negro Theatre 93
A Note on African Art 98
The Negro Spirituals 105
More of the Negro in Art 113
The Negro and the American Stage 117
The Drama of Negro Life 122
The Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection 127
The American Negro as Artist 129
Toward a Critique of Negro Music 136
Excerpt from T he Negro and His Music (1936): From Jazz to
Jazz Classics: 1926–1936 146
Negro Art: Past and Present 155
Negro Music Goes to Par 160
Broadway and the Negro Drama 167
PPaarrtt 33:: EEsstthheettiiccss
Introduction 173
Impressions of Luxor 175
Internationalism—Friend or Foe of Art? 180
Negro Youth Speaks 183
The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts 188
CONTENTS
African Art: Classic Style 194
The Negro in American Culture 198
Our Little Renaissance 211
Beauty Instead of Ashes 214
Art or Propaganda? 219
Beauty and the Provinces 221
Spiritual Truancy 224
Propaganda—or Poetry? 228
The Negro’s Contribution to American Culture 240
PPaarrtt 44:: RRaaccee
Introduction 251
Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations 253
Apropos of Africa 262
The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture 269
The Problem of Race Classifi cation 278
Should the Negro be Encouraged to Cultural Equality? 285
The Contribution of Race to Culture 293
Slavery in the Modern Manner 297
Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane 307
Foreword: Frederick Douglass “Life and Times” 318
Whither Race Relations? A Critical Commentary 322
The Negro in the Three Americas 331
Special Section: When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race
and Culture Contacts 343
PPaarrtt 55:: VVaalluuee aanndd CCuullttuurree
Introduction 421
Oxford: By a Negro Student 423
The American Temperament 428
The Ethics of Culture 435
The New Negro 442
Values and Imperatives 452
Value 465
A Functional View of Value Ultimates 477
Self-Criticism: The Third Dimension of Culture 487
Frontiers of Culture 491
Values that Matter 497
Freud and Scientifi c Morality 499
PPaarrtt 66:: DDeemmooccrraaccyy
Introduction 507
The Mandate System: A New Code of Empire 509
The Negro Vote in 1936 528
Ballad for Democracy 530
Color: Unfi nished Business of Democracy 534
Democracy Faces a World Order 541
Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace 548
Moral Imperatives for World Order 555
Color and Democracy 557
Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy 559
Pluralism and Ideological Peace 567
LLiisstt ooff PPeerrssoonnss DDiissccuusssseedd iinn LLoocckkee’’ss EEssssaayyss 557733
Index 577
Foreword
When I conceived of this series of the collected essays of major thinkers in the
African American tradition, I had two writers in mind: James McCune Smith
and Alain Locke. James McCune Smith (1813–1865) earned three degrees from
the University of Glasgow between 1835 and 1837, and was most probably, before
W. E. B. Du Bois matriculated at Fisk and Harvard, the most well-educated and
accomplished black man of letters in the nineteenth-century. His friend, Freder-
ick Douglass, often commented upon his towering intellect, and asked him to
write the introduction to his second slave narrative, “My Bondage and My Free-
dom.” McCune Smith was one of the most prolifi c essayists of his generation.
But because he did not collect his writings and publish them as a book, much of
the importance of his thinking was relegated to the archives, remaining frag-
mented for a century and a half, his impact only partially understood. Professor
John Stauffer’s edition of his collected works in this series, published in 2006 by
Oxford University Press, has helped quite dramatically to restore McCune Smith
to his rightful place as a major fi gure in the African American canon.
(Coincidentally, at the launch of this volume at the New-York Historical So-
ciety, several of McCune Smith’s descendants, responding to invitations from
Stauffer, attended and confessed that they had no idea that their distinguished
ancestor was an African American, since his children had decided to pass, cer-
tainly an unintended benefi t of the series!)
In addition to James McCune Smith, I was motivated to propose this series of
collected essays to Oxford because of my high regard for Alain Locke, the fi rst
professionally trained African American academic philosopher. I fi rst encoun-
tered Locke’s work on aesthetics and criticism as an undergraduate at Yale in the
1969–1970 academic year, the very year that “Afro-American Studies,” as we
called it then, was being introduced as a major on so many college campuses. The
Harlem Renaissance was one of our two compelling African American topics du
jour, as it were (along with black agency in slavery), and to study the Harlem
Renaissance, one soon learned, was to encounter the aesthetic theories and the
cultural criti cism of Alain Locke.
For several reasons Locke was an inspiration to us, the fi rst generation of stu-
dents of color to benefi t from affi rmative action policies that allowed us to compete
vii
FOREWORD
in large numbers with white students (historically, white universities had imposed
and maintained strict racial quotas on the number of black students matricu-
lating). First of all, he was not only a scholar, but a professional philosopher at
that, educated at Harvard (gradua ting one year before T. S. Eliot) and at the Uni-
versity of Oxford as our country’s fi rst black Rhodes Scholar, where he rubbed
shoulders with fellow Rhodes Scholars Horace M. Kallen, one of the pivotal fi g-
ures in cultural pluralism, and Pa Ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders of the Afri-
can National Congress of South Africa. And he had chosen to study philosophy
for his Ph.D. after Du Bois, just a decade or so before him at Harvard, had de-
cided that no Negro could make a career as a professional philosopher. (Both Du
Bois and Locke, by the way, had went on after Harvard College to study at what
is now the University of Berlin.) For those of us who entertained the notion of
becoming a scholar, or at least following our undergraduate education with post-
graduate study in Europe, Locke, like Du Bois, was an inspiration: “the most ex-
quisitely educated African American of his generation,” as Charles Molesworth
puts it in his compelling introduction to this volume.
But Locke was an inspiration for another important reason: he was the veri-
table “dean” of the fabled Harlem Renaissance, the cultural movement that many
of us presumed to be the doppelganger of our own cultural movement, the Black
Arts movement. Our ability to enroll at schools such as Harvard or Yale, we real-
ized, was in some way an extension of that movement, and both were legatees of
the Renaissance in Harlem in the nineteen twenties. We studied the Harlem
Renaissance, and Locke’s involvement and what he wrote about it, as both model
and cautionary tale about the role of our iteration of Du Bois’s educated class of
African Americans, the “talented tenth,” as he famously put it. Locke’s example
came to be a part of our very own cultural moment, the “revolution” that we so
self-consciously wish to affect.
Locke’s ideas about cultural nationalism, cultural pluralism and hybridity, his
insistence that “race” was always socially constructed, his writings about African
and African American art, about the image of black subjects in American and
European art and literature, his prescient understanding of the nature and func-
tion of improvisation in African American music, and his theories and practical
criticism of African American literature, his valorization of folk traditions—with
the caveat that these should be “universalized,” as Leonard Harris puts it—his
complex relation to white patronage, his belief that literature and the arts were
another form of the civil rights movement, the arc of his career as a teacher, writer,
editor, and critic, and his homosexuality—all of these aspects of his work and life
made him an endlessly fascinating source for us in the late sixties and throughout
the seventies, as the Black Arts movement faded and the Black Studies move-
ment became institutionalized throughout the American academy. But without a
collection of Locke’s prolifi c, yet scattered, writings, a full assessment of his role
as a philosopher and a critic was quite diffi cult to achieve.
Drawing upon efforts to collect Locke’s work by scholars such as Jeffrey Stewart
(1983) and Leonard Harris (1989), and critical assessments by scholars such as
viii
FOREWORD
Cornel West, Johnny Washington, and Leonard Harris, Charles Molesworth
(who, with Harris, has co-authored the defi nitive biography of Locke) has here
assembled the defi nitive collection of Alain Locke’s work that we’ve been waiting
for. It covers the breadth of subjects that concerned Locke, including literature, art,
drama, music, aesthetics, race, value and culture, and democracy—topics to which
he returned again and again, to extend and amplify his thinking over almost half a
century of refl ection. With this collection, Locke’s proper place in the history of
philosophy, aesthetics, and pragmatism, can more readily and fully be assessed, as
can his role in the history of African American cultural criticism. Charles Moles-
worth’s superb introductory essay sets the stage, providing essential reading for
anyone seeking to understand the importance of Alain Locke to the history of
American letters.
—HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
ix