Book review: The New Negro by Jeffrey C.

Stewart
Reviewed by Alejandro Batista Tejada
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-negro-9780190056056?
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Following a chronological structure, Stewart’s book narrates Alain L. Locke’s

biography from his early life up until the end of his days, with one sole exception: “A
Death and a Birth”1, the first chapter, which starts the book in media res. This
introductory chapter succeeds at getting the reader’s attention and begins at the core of
the main protagonist of the book’s life. Straight from the first page we learn how his
mother’s death freed him from Black Victorian constraints and thus triggered his
ambition to modulate what would become The New Negro, a new notion for the black
community of America to develop a new identity based on the black experience and to
create culture on their own basis. The author’s decision to begin this biography,
paradoxical as it may seem, with death, constitutes a magnificent starting point, for it is
death – the death of a feeling, an ideal or a mother – what triggers sometimes the most
powerful changes. Endings are indeed excellent catalysts for new beginnings, and in this
book it constitutes a phenomenal prelude for what comes next.

It is not surprising that Professor Stewart, who has worked previously on Alain Locke 2
and whose PhD dissertation was a biography of Alain Locke3, decided to contribute to
the ongoing effort of the academia to rescue some previously hidden or invisible figures
from crucial periods of literary history. To the growing interest of scholars in previously
ostracized artists such as Nella Larsen and the current study of hardly known African
American figures like Hubert Harrison4, there is also a contemporary eagerness to study
Alain Locke with a renewed focus on his determining role in the creation and the
promotion of the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, in this particular case the last decade has
seen two biographies of Alain Locke 5, one critical edition of some of his lectures 6 and a
reissue of his major opus The New Negro: an interpretation7.

This will to reclaim such forgotten personalities is indeed paramount in Stewart’s book,
since it constitutes a homage to the irreplaceable impact made by the black philosopher
who laid the foundations for the Harlem Renaissance. While the book’s length might
strike as overwhelming at first sight, it is remarkably full of details which add up to
Locke’s merit, crammed with well-known personalities such as Langston Hughes or
Zora Neale Hurston, and brimming with thorough explanations of what Locke did, how
he did it and how it molded his character and his (self-)determination to become one of
the main reasons why the Harlem cultural and artistic Renaissance took place. One
blotch, though, lies in Stewart’s analysis of Locke’s character in terms of his sexuality.
Although these analyses are well justified in most cases by textual sources, as is the case
in the book as a whole, this recurrent depiction of Alain Locke as a sexual predator
when it came to his relationships with other male artists may strike as problematic, to
say the least, especially when we consider the persistent definition of Locke as a careful
and almost paranoid closeted homosexual.

However, Stewart’s book is a magnificent biographical account of Alain Locke through

and through, with thorough and highly documented narrations and with the clear
statement that The New Negro constituted a pivotal factor in the development of a race’s
culture and identity. Actually, the fact that the concept of The New Negro does not
appear until page 436 speaks for itself in terms of structure as well as of significance,
for this concept is placed literally at the core of the book and thus marks a clear frontier
between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ in the book as well as in Locke’s life course and in
the awakening of the African American.

Locke was the architect of a new negro identity, the catalyst for a new assessment of
black agency in the arts and for a reinterpretation of the value that African American
culture imbued to American culture as a whole. Jeffrey C. Stewart excels at making this
point clear and, not only does he state so in an understandable manner, but he also
accompanies his portrayal of Alain Locke with an entourage of transcendental people,
relevant places and crucial events of his life that greatly conform the great biography
that the reader finds in The New Negro: the life of Alain Locke.
Finally, I want to accommodate Steve Jobs’ idea of ‘connecting the dots’ 8 for my final
assessment of this book. In life, as in literature, it’s all about connecting the dots, and
the author does this in a remarkable way so as to impress on the reader a comprehensive
knowledge about the life of Alain Leroy Locke. He provides the reader with the means
to look back on the text and see that the dots have been connected in Locke’s story. As
Steve Jobs put it, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect
them looking backward” and see it all made sense in one way or another. It all definitely
made sense in Stewart’s excellent book.
 Notes

1. Jeffrey C. Stewart, “A Death and a Birth” in The New Negro: The Life of Alain
Locke.

2. See The critical temper of Alain Locke: a selection of his essays on art and culture.

3. See A Biography of Alain Locke: philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance, 1886-1930

by Jeffrey C. Stewart.

4. See Jeffrey Babcok Perry’s biography of Hubert Harrison: the struggle for equality,
1918-1927, published in 2021.

5. See Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth’s Alain L. Locke: the biography of a
philosopher.

6. See Jacoby Adeshei Carter’s African American Contributions to the Americas’

Cultures: A Critical Edition of Lectures by Alain Locke, specially its “Introduction”
chapter.

7. The New Negro: An Interpretation, reissued by Dover Publications in 2021.

8. Taken from Steve Jobs’ Commencement address on June 12, 2005 at Stanford
University. Retrieved from: https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/