My thesis reconsiders Du Bois’ role in creating a black aesthetic, challenging prevailing notions about his opposition to the New Negro Renaissance and broadening the scope of his contributions in developing an indigenous, self-determined aesthetic. Currently, Harlem-centric historiography remains over-reliant on Du Bois’ own interpretations and unconcerned about his motives for misrepresenting the catalysts and the outcomes of the aesthetic and intellectual debates that define the period. By examining aesthetic controversies outside his dominant ‘failure’ interpretation and beyond the narrow geographical perimeters of a romanticized Harlem, the vital contributions Du Bois made to an intellectual dialogue that inspired artists to articulate a black aesthetic can be recognized. While some scholars have acknowledged the history of the renaissance has been unfairly shrouded in failure, none have explored Du Bois’ role as an aesthetic visionary, a position complicated by his categorical denunciation of the New Negro Renaissance. My research repositions Du Bois as a major ideological force at the genesis of the Black Aesthetic, both as an advocate and antagonist of the aesthetic ideals that define the movement. By tracing his intellectual evolution throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, my thesis identifies how ideological conflicts within the NAACP and intellectual rivalries with Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, and Alain Locke impact Du Bois’ vacillating beliefs, and how his writings about art and his leadership as editor of The Crisis define the intellectual foundation and embody the racial dilemmas through which New Negroes create a revolutionary aesthetic. Du Bois’ insistence that artistic decadence and deleterious white commercial interests undermine the renaissance is reconsidered, allowing him, ironically, to be recognized as the New Negro Renaissance’s most important intellectual force in defining the Black Aesthetic.

"Beyond the Veil of the Secret City: New Negro Representation in Washington, D.C., 1919-1935" examines Black Washingtonians' multiple, and often competing, articulations of the New Negro. In addition to addressing the New Negro as a cultural trope that reinforces ideas about black progress, my dissertation also analyzes the term's material manifestation in the nation's capital. My dissertation builds on recent New Negro era scholarship including Chicago's New Negroes (2007) by Davarian Baldwin and Prove It On Me (2012) by Erin Chapman. These studies have conceptually decentered Harlem as the primary site in which New Negro identity flourished. These studies have also foregrounded the significance of black consumerism and leisure to New Negro identity. My study situates Washington, D.C. within this discussion by demonstrating how Black Washington used New Negro ideology as a warrant for social policing, an impetus for remaking literary and theatrical representation; and an economic activist ideology. Utilizing a rich assemblage of archival sources, I examine Black Washington's negotiation of New Negro identity in a 1919 obscenity trial, Edward Christopher Williams' epistolary novel "Letters of Davy Carr" (now published as When Washington Was in Vogue), Georgia Douglas Johnson's play William and Ellen Craft (1935), and the New Negro Alliance's newspaper New Negro Opinion. "Beyond the Veil of the Secret City" ultimately presents the New Negro was more than a literary trope used to combat racist representations. It was the ideological imperative animating Black Washington's ongoing struggle to realize racial progress in the public sphere.

Many of the Harlem Renaissance anthologies and histories of the movement marginalize and omit women writers who played a significant role in it. They neglect to include them because these women worked outside of socially determined domestic roles and wrote texts that portrayed women as main characters rather than as muses for men or supporting characters. The distorted representation of women of the Renaissance will become clearer through the exploration of the following texts: Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Caroline Bond Day’s “Pink Hat,” Dorothy West’s “Mammy,” Angelina Grimke’s Rachel and “Goldie,” and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South. In these texts, the themes of passing, motherhood, and lynching are narrated from the consciousness of women, a consciousness that was largely neglected by male writers.

The New Negro Movement, also referred to as the New Negro Renaissance or Harlem Renaissance, was a blossoming of literature, music, and visual art that took place in northern urban African American communities circa 1925 through the mid-1930s. To date, scholars examining this historical period have largely focused on the Harlem area in New York, hence the popular catchphrase used to describe the times, "the Harlem Renaissance." Certainly, Harlem artists were prolific and the work they produced was significant in the ways in which it conveyed to the public the message of racial uplift and pride in African heritage embedded within the New Negro Movement. Nevertheless, African Americans residing in other major cities, such as Chicago, also were demonstrating significant developments in all aspects of the arts. In my dissertation, "Chicago and the Visual Art of the New Negro Movement, 1920s-1940," I undertake an in-depth examination of the African American visual arts scene in Chicago during this period, and analyze the manner in which the work of Chicago artists fit into the national discourse of the New Negro Movement. The many and varied accomplishments of these artists, coupled with their roles as agents for social change, make them attractive and significant research interests, well deserving of a place in the art history canon. My dissertation will help fill an important gap in the history of American art and of the African American ‘New Negro’ period.

This research explores Louis Armstrong’s artistic choices and their impact directly and indirectly on the African-American literary, visual and performing arts between 1923 and 1930 during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. This research uses analyses of musical transcriptions and examples of the period’s literary and visual arts to verify the significance of Armstrong’s influence(s). This research also analyzes the early nineteenth century West-African musical practices evident in Congo Square that were present in the traditional jazz and cultural behaviors that Armstrong heard and experienced growing up in New Orleans. Additionally, through a discourse analysis approach, this research examines the impact of Armstrong’s art on the philosophical debate regarding the purpose of the period’s art. Specifically, W.E.B. Du Bois’s desire for the period’s art to be used as propaganda and Alain Locke’s admonitions that period African-American artists not produce works with the plight of blacks in America as the sole theme.

This research explores Louis Armstrong’s artistic choices and their impact directly and indirectly on the African-American literary, visual and performing arts between 1923 and 1930 during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. This research uses analyses of musical transcriptions and examples of the period’s literary and visual arts to verify the significance of Armstrong’s influence(s). This research also analyzes the early nineteenth century West-African musical practices evident in Congo Square that were present in the traditional jazz and cultural behaviors that Armstrong heard and experienced growing up in New Orleans. Additionally, through a discourse analysis approach, this research examines the impact of Armstrong’s art on the philosophical debate regarding the purpose of the period’s art. Specifically, W.E.B. Du Bois’s desire for the period’s art to be used as propaganda and Alain Locke’s admonitions that period African-American artists not produce works with the plight of Blacks in America as the sole theme.

The decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union have seen an increased interest in uncovering the relationship between New Negro era authors and intellectuals and the radical leftism that had such a widespread influence in the twentieth century. Scholars are reanalyzing the life and works of figures like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and others in light of each author's interaction with and acceptance of communist and socialist ideals. These studies trace these radical connections in an effort to better understand New Negro authors and their work during a time of revolution and social upheaval. There is still much work to be done, however, in the study of those African American authors who were not directly allied with these movements, but nonetheless were vital voices in the radical atmosphere of the time. One such author is Wallace Thurman, an influential editor and writer who is connected to communism and socialism in undeniable ways, but also seems ideologically distant from his radical leftist peers. Examining Thurman's body of work as a part of a larger revolutionary trend reveals that though his views differed from and often reacted against communist rhetoric as he understood it, Thurman did use that rhetoric to form his own radical ideology. Thurman's most famous novel, The Blacker the Berry, gives insight into both the radical change that the author hoped for, as well as his vision of the best way to bring about that change. The novel's protagonist, Emma Lou Morgan, represents those individuals who cannot quite manage to fit into a mass movement because her dark skin and psychological issues with her own race and skin color prevent her from easily molding herself to the ideals of others. Emma Lou's struggle for mental independence reveals that though Thurman longed for large-scale, radical reform, he also insisted that no such reform was possible without first helping individuals to overcome their personal psychological barriers. This study of Thurman and his radicalism not only shows that not all revolutionaries of the time were communists, it also begins the work of tracing a New Negro radicalism that was connected to the communist and socialist movements, but also included veins unique to each author's social, racial, and geographic position.

Scholars over the last two decades or so have become increasingly interested in methods of interpreting history, society, and literature that do not rely on nationalistic paradigms. One vein of the transnational analytic trend is interested not only in the multiplicity of cultural geographies but also in the materiality of geography. Such critical work is extremely helpful in challenging myopic nationalist readings; yet the materiality of geography used as a theoretical lens has even greater potential. Using geographical formations as a basis for literary analysis can yield a theoretical base that has nothing to do with the borders of nations (whether it be one nation or many nations) and everything to do with the borders of the planet, a material planet indifferent to national affiliation. Instead of a transnational globe, we inhabit an a-national earth. In order for material geography to be used more fully for a-national readings as opposed to transnational critique, it is essential that the physical aspects of said geography not be subsumed in metaphorical applications. Geographer David Harvey has developed ideas about the different conceptions of space and time, and it is this research that can grant material geography a more precise and accurate definition in literary studies, and thus ensure that issues of materiality are not sidelined by metaphorical considerations. Wallace Thurman's novel The Blacker the Berry, when read through a lens of material geography that is focused with Harvey's space and time conceptions, suggests a method of identity formation complicated by the earth's physical insensibility to humankind (I focus specifically on mountains). Other texts of the New Negro era (namely the work of leading lights such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes) also show evidence of entertaining the planet's a-national characteristics. Members of both the old and new guard of the New Negro era worked to construct an alternative to the "Sambo" image of the Old Negro (Gates 130; van Notten 131-33), even though their views on what this image should be were radically different. While New Negro era writers' efforts to forge a new identity for the black person were explicitly focused on race and its connection to the United States, the mountain trope as used in their texts introduces an a-national perspective that challenges not only the identity building being practiced by New Negro era writers but also current uses of transnationalism which too often result in nationalism re-visited. By using the materiality of mountains in The Blacker the Berry to introduce a-nationalism, I propose that the novel does not simply explore identity (a point made by several other scholars) but also challenges identity-building practices.

The New Negro Movement (often called the Harlem Renaissance) made black creative production visible to an extent unprecedented in American History. Complex representations of African Americans started to infiltrate a popular culture previously dominated by stereotypes; people from all walks of life were confronted for the first time with art made by African Americans that asked them to think in new ways about the meaning of race in America. The term Harlem Renaissance conjures up images of urban America, but the creative energies of many New Negro figures were actually focused elsewhere—on rural America. Urbanite Jean Toomer spent time teaching in an agricultural college in the rural South, and wrote award-winning poetry and prose about that experience. Langston Hughes wrote blues lyrics about the struggles of rural migrants in New York that highlighted the complex interconnections of rural and urban experience. And the pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux incorporated numerous fictionalized accounts of his own experiences as a homesteader in South Dakota into his race movies and novels. New Negro writers asserted that their art shaped how people understood themselves and were understood by others. Accordingly, this project examines both literary representations, and how literary works related to the real lives and struggles of rural African Americans. My research combines archival, literary, and biographical materials to analyze the aesthetic choices of three New Negro authors (Hughes, Micheaux, and Toomer), and explain the interrelated literary and cultural contexts that shaped their depictions of African American rural life. Houston Baker, in his influential 1987 book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, defined black modernism as an awareness of radical uncertainty in human life. My central contention is that one of the most radical uncertainties in interwar-period America was the changing rural landscape. I revisit the largely-forgotten (though large-scale) social movement to fight rural outmigration by modernizing rural life. And I argue that, rather than accepting the simple binary that took the urban to be modern and the rural backward, African Americans in the 1920s created and experienced complicated formulations of the rural and its connections to modern blackness. / text

abstract: Mapping Intersectionality in Harlem Renaissance Women's Poetry comprises the first book-length study devoted to examining the role women's poetry played in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and sociopolitical movement that reached its zenith in the 1920s. This study is situated in a theoretical interdisciplinarity that complicates critical approaches to Black women's subjectivities with respect to resistance and representation. It combines literary, race and gender theory to perform close readings of New Negro Women's poetry. Central chapters of the text theorize the poets' overshadowed engagement with the political movement via the tropes of interiority, motherhood, and sexuality; a closing chapter puts New Negro women's poetry in conversation with the Black Arts Movement. Building on the feminist sociological framework of Intersectionality, which considers the lived experience of individuals who embody multiple layers of marginalization, this dissertation works to identify and unpack sources of racialized gendered disparity in Harlem Renaissance studies. In acknowledging that self–actualization and self–articulation are central to this identity–based movement — a presupposition that informs this study's thesis — it becomes necessary to consider the gendered aspects of the writing for a more comprehensive review of the period. The analytical framework of Intersectionality provides a means to acknowledge New Negro women poets' perspectives regarding their racialized and gendered selves. In essence, Mapping Intersectionality is a concentrated effort toward unearthing evidence of their significant push against race and gender oppression. The motivation driving this study is revision and reclamation: revisionist in its concern for redefining the parameters in which the movement is traditionally perceived; a reclamation in its objective to underscore the influential, but nearly forgotten voices of the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2013