The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (American Studies)

Anna Pochmara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9089643192 ISBN 13: 9789089643193

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, 2014

The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance, which for many decades did not attract a lot of scholarly attention, until, in the 1990s, many scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was. Using African American published texts, American archives and unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book focuses both on the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and on writers who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significance for the movement, such as Wallace Thurman. Its perspective combines gender, sexuality, and race studies with a thorough literary analysis and historicist investigation, an approach that has not been extensively applied to analyze the New Negro Renaissance.

Review:

"The Making of the New Negro breaks completely new ground in our understanding of the male writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Conceptually rich and theoretically sophisticated this is a powerful and compelling portrait of the racialized politics of masculinity and non-normative sexualities of the New Negro. Anna Pochmara has written an utterly persuasive and very important book."

--Hazel V. Carby, Yale University

From the Back Cover:

The Making of the New Negro onderzoekt zwarte mannelijkheid in de periode van de Harlem Renaissance, die lange tijd weinig wetenschappelijke aandacht trok, totdat in de jaren negentig veel geleerden ontdekten hoe complex, belangrijk en boeiend deze tijd was. Anna Pochmara maakt gebruik van Afro-Amerikaanse teksten, Amerikaanse archieven, niet-gepub