Inventing the New Negro

Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography

Daphne Lamothe

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812240931, 9780812240931
• eBook ISBN: 9780812204049
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which key figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown adapted ethnography and folklore in their narratives to create a cohesive, collective, and modern black identity.Lamothe explores how these figures assumed the roles of self-reflective translators and explicators of African American and African diasporic cultures to Western, largely white audiences. Lamothe argues that New Negro writers ultimately shifted the presuppositions of both literary modernism and modernist anthropology by making their narratives as much about ways of understanding as they were about any quest for objective knowledge. In critiquing the ethnographic framework within which they worked, they confronted the classist, racist, and cultural biases of the dominant society and challenged their readers to imagine a different set of relations between the powerful and the oppressed. Inventing the New Negro combines an intellectual history of one of the most important eras of African American letters with nuanced and original readings of seminal works of literature. It will be of interest not only to Harlem Renaissance scholars but to anyone who is interested in the intersections of culture, literature, folklore, and ethnography.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Ethnography and the New Negro Imagination
• 2 Men of Science in the Post-Slavery Era
• 3 Raising the Veil: Racial Divides and Ethnographic Crossings in The Souls of Black Folk
• 4 Striking Out into the Interior: Travel, Imperialism, and Ethnographic Perspectives in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• 5 Living Culture in Sterling Brown’s Southern Road
• 6 Woman Dancing Culture: Katherine Dunham’s Dance/Anthropology
• 7 Narrative Dissonance: Conflict and Contradiction in Hurston’s Caribbean Ethnography
• 8 Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Vodou Intertext
• 9 Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments