Sherrard Johnson’s chapter identifies some of the various aesthetic models and modes with which African Americans experimented in telling individual life stories during the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the interwar years. Sherrard Johnson argues that in migration and travel narratives and other autobiographical writings of the New Negro era, African American authors travel literally and figuratively; the power of these self-stories resides in an author’s interior reflection fused with external observations that both harness and resist the collective self.

Conceptualizing “black space” as both human and spatial geographies enables a linkage of New Negro modernism and southern realities, a linkage that in turn foregrounds the importance of the American South in the making of the literary and cultural production of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. The American South contributed literally and figuratively to the burgeoning critical and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, and not merely in terms of contemporary writers and artists of southern birth but especially in terms of historical customs, traditions, and practices of racial segregation, discrimination, and trauma underpinning the modern race writing appearing in magazines, journals, and newspapers during the 1920s.

This chapter identifies an alternative trajectory for tracing Alain Locke’s role in shaping the New Negro movement of the 1920s. As argued, Locke’s development as a theorist and architect of the New Negro movement can be traced back to the first decade of the twentieth century when Locke “swerved” away from the notion of the individual artist as “genius.” Locke found inspiration in Paul Laurence Dunbar, who himself had moved away from the notion of artist as genius to that of artist as “representative poet.” In particular, through this engagement with Dunbar, Locke formulated a notion of a race tradition rooted in intellectual influence and in the cultural and literary material that constitute an archive, which could stand in for an absent independent physical nation. This innovative notion laid the groundwork for the definition of the modern artist of the twentieth century, launching, in effect, a new theory of literature and the work that it does in the world.