This book sets out to analyze gender and sexuality constructions in selected texts of New Negro Renaissance discourse. One of the main aims of this book is to examine the production of literary and cultural history as an ongoing dialogic process that is mediated through the notions of gender and sexuality. Such a dialogue is exemplified by the opening epigraphs. J. Saunders Redding and Amiri Baraka refer to the same period of black literary history and yet their assessments are diametrically opposed. More significantly, both views are expressed in a gender-marked way – on the one hand, the New Negro Renaissance is praised as “masculine” and, on the other, represented as the abject – condemned as “weak, “heinous,” and femininely able to “spawn.” Following the logic revealed in this example, this study will explore how aesthetic evaluations and representations of the New Negro Renaissance are diversely entangled in the tropes of gender and sexuality. In the main body, this gender-marked dialogue will be analyzed on the example of the two leading figures of the movement, Wallace Thurman and Alain Locke. In the Prologue and the Epilogue, this synchronic perspective will be complemented with a focus on the public debates preceding and immediately following the Renaissance.

The examination of these dialogical rhetorics will demonstrate that the role of masculinity is especially significant in historical narratives of black literature. Both levels of analysis, diachronic and synchronic, will examine how the tropes loaded with gendered and sexual connotations serve either to celebrate or to repudiate rival black leaders. Consequently, a discussion of relations among towering black authors needs the explanatory potential of two theoretical paradigms: Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence and Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar's anxiety of authorship.