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1 results

  • Chapter 20 - Alain Locke and the Value of the Harlem Renaissance

  • from Part IV - Performing the New Negro
  • Edited by Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert, University of Iowa
  • Book:
    A History of the Harlem Renaissance
    Published online:
    20 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021, pp 361-377

  • Summary

    This chapter details Alain Locke’s contributions to value theory and their relationship to the overall cultural project of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Locke viewed the New Negro Renaissance and the transvaluation of black art – that is, the re-estimation of its value according to new principles of judgment – as one moment in a deeper and ongoing axiological transformation. To do so, it looks at his writings on African American spirituals and his “cultural retrospectives” of the 1930s and 1940s (annual reviews that took stock of the year’s work in black themes) as exemplary instances of such transvaluation. In these writings, Locke continually revised the significance and boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance.