The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

  • 37h 16m 52s
  • Jeffrey C. Stewart
  • Recorded Books, Inc.
  • 2019

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally.

He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man.

In this Audiobook

  • 1. A Death and a Birth
  • 2. A Black Victorian Childhood
  • 3. Child God and Black Aesthete
  • 4. An Errand of Culture at Harvard College, 1904–1905
  • 5. Locke's Intellectual Awakening, 1905–1907
  • 6. Going for the Rhodes
  • 7. Oxford Contrasts
  • 8. Black Cosmopolitan
  • 9. Paying Second-Year Dues at Oxford, 1908–1909
  • 10. Italy and America, 1909–1910
  • 11. Berlin Stories
  • 12. Exile's Returns
  • 13. Race Cosmopolitan Comes Home, 1911–1912
  • 14. Radical Sociologist at Howard University, 1912–1916
  • 15. Rapprochement and Silence: Harvard, 1916–1917
  • 16. Fitting in Washington, D.C., 1917–1922
  • 17. Rebirth
  • 18. Mother of a Movement, Mothered in Return, 1922–1923
  • 19. Europe Before Egypt
  • 20. Egypt Bound
  • 21. Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1924
  • 22. The Dinner and the Dean
  • 23. Battling the Barnes
  • 24. Looking for Love and Finding the New Negro
  • 25. Harlem Issues
  • 26. The New Negro and Howard
  • 27. The New Negro and The Blacks
  • 28. Beauty or Propaganda?
  • 29. Black Curator and White Momma
  • 30. Langston's Indian Summer
  • 31. The American Scholar
  • 32. On Maternalism
  • 33. The Naked and the Nude
  • 34. The Saving Grace of Realism
  • 35. Bronze Booklets, Gold Art
  • 36. Warn a Brother
  • 37. The Riot and the Ride
  • 38. Transformation
  • 39. Two Trains Running
  • 40. The Queer Toussaint
  • 41. The Invisible Locke
  • 42. FBI, Haiti, and Diasporic Democracy
  • 43. Wisdom de Profundis
  • 44. The New Negro Lives
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