The Making of the New Negro

Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

Distributed for Amsterdam University Press

Amsterdam University Press - American Studies

Paper $39.95 ISBN: 9789089643193 Published November 2011 For sale only in the United States, its dependencies, the Philippines, and Canada

The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s in America and was marked by an outpouring of African American art, music, theater and literature. The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, began attracting extensive academic attention in the 1990s as scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was.

Drawing on African American texts, archives, unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book highlights both the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture such as W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and other writers such as Wallace Thurman, who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significant contributions to the movement.

Anna Pochmara offers a striking combination of thorough literary analysis and historicist investigation in order to provide novel insights into one of the most important periods of black history in the United States.