According to traditional African-American literary histories, the turn of the twentieth century was dominated by the Washington-Du Bois debate, the 1920s and early 1930s by the New Negro movement, and the following years by the unquestionable hegemony of a single figure: Richard Wright. Since my study is interested in the dialogic relationships in literary history, the concluding chapter examines the ways in which the rhetorical tropes and ideological dynamics hitherto introduced and analyzed are employed in Wright's early writings. It focuses on the way Wright forges collective black subjectivity in response to the earlier concepts of the Talented Tenth, different New Negroes, and Niggerati. This analysis will develop the argument about the significance of gender and sexuality in black literary identity politics, which constitutes the main thread of reasoning in The Making of the New Negro.

The most significant difference between Wright's revisions and the earlier emancipatory constructs arises from the way he recapitulates the relationship among the masses, the bourgeoisie, and black agency, unanimously privileging the working-class identity. This in turn influences the dialectic between the anxiety of authorship and the anxiety of influence in his texts. Whereas the anxiety of authorship and the attempts to build a patrilineal interracial lineage or even network of influences characterized both Locke's and Thurman's writings, Wright militantly enters the battle with his well-established predecessors and challenges their fortified positions with his proletarian rhetoric. He attacks their elitism and bohemianism through gendered and sexualized tropes. Consequently, both on the level of aesthetic theory and the aesthetics of his texts, he entertains a much rougher and more assertive vision of black masculinity than the preceding black leaders and authors. The construction of femininity in his depiction of black gender relations shifts accordingly.