Harlem Renaissance as Dialectical Gambit of Black Liberation by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#9, MARCH-MAY/2020

The work of Locke and DuBois during the Harlem Renaissance is of vital theoretical significance due to their profound influence upon a dialectical turn in the ongoing discourse of Black liberation towards socio-historical recognition and ontological reconstitution of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. For it is in the discourse and debates surrounding the ‘New Negro’ arising from the intersubjective resonance of Black community in the immediate post-World War I era that a renewal of that universal historical imperative of social unrest towards Black liberation in confrontation with western imperialist power is disclosed. [1] This ‘New Negro’ reconstitution of Black subjectivity encompasses a lived tension of awakening class consciousness, political agitation and cultural nationalism that ultimately finds its foremost discursive articulation within an emancipatory aesthetics of cultural pluralism. “The mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” [2]

Precisely by “shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem”, Locke pushes beyond previous socio-ontological boundaries which centered around a pragmatic assimilationist “psychology of imitation” that merely reconstituted western bourgeois standards within a Black subjectivity thoroughly wedded to American nationalist chauvinism out of genuine concern for basic human survival. As such, “achieving” this “spiritual emancipation” by the Lockean ‘New Negro’ ultimately confronts modernity with refreshingly new aesthetic potentialities that disrupt the normative gaze. “Subtly the conditions that are molding a New Negro are also molding a new American attitude.” [3] Thus the Harlem Renaissance can be understood as a Muhammad Ali ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy of cultural pluralist pugilism against the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. During which, Black community engaged in a survivalist assimilation of western bourgeois standards that functionally cut off the boxing ring of historical movement towards authentic universality by accepting social limitations as tantamount to receiving a beat down in the early rounds of modernity while cornered against the ropes of a perpetual ‘objecthood’. However, at times between rounds, and sometimes late in rounds right before the bell, almost as if to remind established power of the indomitable spiritual depths of the human condition, emancipatory aesthetics originating in the disaster of lived Black experience unleashed flurries of cultural resistance as the Blues metaphysic took advantage of lapses in hegemonic stamina and epistemological weariness to land a few well-placed discursive combinations to the normative gaze, timed with a pugilistic precision to take advantage whenever the imperial mainstream-as-civil society ideologically overextended itself, as exemplified in the post-World War I era.

Even that almighty deity of American nationalist exceptionalism suffered a significant loss of prestige by simultaneously urging an all-out war against global injustice abroad while dissuading armed confrontation with local injustice at home. As such, the normative gaze found itself on the receiving end of cultural resistance as swift combinations of overhand rights and left jabs by an aesthetic rebellion of Black subjectivity introduced disequilibrium within the coloniality of topographical coherence that binds imperial mainstream-as-civil society to the socio-ontological underground of modernity. “What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last night it had a certain truth: We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all? Do we simply want to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?” [4]

The Harlem Renaissance furthered an ongoing confrontation with modernity by an ascendant humanity engaged in aesthetic-ontological rebellion, fueled by the tension of an exceptional antagonism between the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ and a western imperialist continuum. Paradoxically, fighting for an American armed forces which preserved and strengthened western imperialist power on a global scale during World War I, drastically heightened the radical potentialities for armed struggle and resistance against western imperialist power as it manifest itself locally in racist tyranny and injustice within the context of the American nation-state. DuBois understood this even more clearly than Locke: “Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of Hell in our own land. We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” [5]

However, as these emancipatory potentialities began bearing fruit in the lived experience of Black people, an unadulterated ritual savagery of lynching as organized grassroots biopolitical mob violence, already a murderous historical constant of our ‘being-in-the-world’, was even further unleashed upon Black community and grew fiercer in direct proportion to everyday assertions of freedom as an ascendant humanity. This climaxed in the pervasive suppression and bloody struggle for human liberation as exemplified during, but in no ways limited to, that infamous Red summer of 1919, which set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance that followed in its wake as a socio-ontological confrontation of the false sedentary universality of Man-as-western bourgeois subjectivity through Black aesthetic revolt and cultural affirmation of human ‘being’.

With soldiers returning from direct military involvement on behalf of the American nation-state during World War I, Black people once again placed tremendous expectations of human solidarity upon an American populace still in ignorant refusal, or informed denial, of our shared humanity. And much like the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, these historical expectations were betrayed by both ruling power elite and toiling American masses under a united front of ‘white’ identity that actually continues to socially neutralize the supposed revolutionary political determinism of antagonistic economic class interests. “And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” [6]

The proletariat, who are relied on by the capitalist ruling power elite to enforce and legitimize western imperialist power by dogmatic adherence to the biopolitically constructed fiction of ‘race’, are also simultaneously counted upon by Marxist revolutionary theory to act as an emancipatory force of geohistorical importance because of some mythic revolutionary determinism inherent in economic class identity. Whereas the prelude to World War I saw the working class betray its own revolutionary internationalist rhetoric and orientation, the aftermath of World War I saw this petty ‘wonderbread’ cultural nationalist working class resume the murder of Man; as brutal bewildered herds of rational animality ritually accosted men like William Little who was actually lynched for not taking off his United States Army uniform. [7]

As such, the Harlem Renaissance was justifiably “radical in tone yet not in purpose”, [8] for this ‘New Negro’ subjectivity challenged then prevailing Marxist dogma which made no allowances for the possibility of any other legitimate revolutionary subjectivity outside the ‘white-as-universal’ working class. That much needed anthropological revaluation and epistemological ‘stretching’ of Marxist categories initiated by DuBoisian critical theory and so integral to the existential liberationist orientation of Fanon and Sartre was now underway. [9]

Black subjectivity-as-ascendant humanity arises from beneath normative anthropological standards of modernity, drawing its radical emancipatory imperative at swords edge of human ‘being’ lived as constant tension of socio-ontological alterity subjugated by a western imperialist continuum. However, the historical aftershocks unleashed from such an unprecedented seismic epistemological shift would gradually register over time with ever growing intersubjective resonance. For it would not be until future generations truly reaped an emancipatory harvest from the socio-ontological seeds of aesthetic rebellion implicit in the Harlem Renaissance, that this dialectic wager by Locke and DuBois could even be truly appreciated and understood. “We black folk may help for we have within us a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be . . . with new determination for all mankind.” [10]

The great majority of American proletariat masses, however, rather than embrace this “new will” towards constituting an authentic human subjectivity-as-lived universal, were much more concerned with maintaining their ‘white-as-universal subjectivity’ of privilege in alliance with western imperialist power, than exercising any potential solidarity of ascendant humanity with Black people in popular emancipatory revolt.

Modernity, as organized, imposed and underwritten by western imperialist power, and to which Marxism is itself epistemologically indebted, merely reinforces the subhumanity of Black people as a priori fact. “At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it.” [11] As such, the Harlem Renaissance, as a genuine aesthetic-ontological revolt asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, introduced discontinuity within the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum, and for which Marxism was also then very much ill prepared, namely because the socio-historical implications of such a “spiritual emancipation” as initiated by a people who already constitute a fundamental socio-ontological ‘problem’ [12] of modernity, radically outflanks “in tone” any previously rigid materialist eschatological narratives of geohistorical change which were slowly but surely becoming exposed as incapable of constituting the necessary human subjectivity to carry out a truly revolutionary “purpose”.

Although definitely encouraging a retreat from the growing political militance of its day, the Harlem Renaissance is best understood as an even more radical phenomenon of socio-ontological reorientation, an aesthetic rebellion and cultural reconstitution of human ‘being’ which effectively refused to barter away that relentless transcendence and spiritual upheaval which serve as the foundation of human endeavor (including revolutionary action), for yet another epistemological variant of that self-same ‘white’ subjectivity-as-universal which originates from a western imperialist continuum and provides no new lived context which might have dissuaded that savage 10,000 strong horde of rational animality in Tulsa, Oklahoma who brutalized an ascendant humanity through violent mob terror aided by actual airplane raids resulting in completely destroying the Black section of town known as ‘Little Africa’ or ‘Black Wallstreet’ in 1921. [13]

Locke initiated The New Negro with an acute discursive reconstitution of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ which then prepared the way for DuBois, who had the last word in that very same text, to globally situate this new Black subjectivity within a more concrete socio-historical context, ultimately disclosing its exceptional antagonistic relation to a western imperialist continuum, and unveiling its topographical alterity in relation to modernity itself. “Modern imperialism and modern industrialism are one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree. The race problem is the other side of the labor problem; and the black man’s burden is the white man’s burden. . . . remembering always that empire is the heavy hand of capital abroad. . . . This almost naïve setting of the darker races beyond the pale of democracy and of modern humanity . . . involves two things – acquiescence of the darker peoples and agreement between capital and labor in white democracies.” [14] Empire, as the “heavy hand of capital”, has since undergone a series of reconfigurations and to this day, has been able to sustain and prolong the “acquiescence of the darker peoples” who populate the socio-ontological underground of modernity, even while expansively globalizing the cooperative “agreement” with “labor”, consequently assimilating state socialist and state communist opposition into a more complete and thorough hegemony of western imperialist power.

Thus, Locke and DuBois engaged in a dialectical gambit of the highest stakes, an epistemological gambit which temporarily suspended the historical justification of radical political agitation on aesthetic-cultural grounds, until such engagement necessarily encompassed not only the obvious economic exploitation of labor by capital, but also the racist dehumanization inherent in modernity itself, a dehumanization which socio-ontologically haunts even the redemptive claims of Marxist eschatology. [15]

By initiating this aesthetic confrontation of modernity, a vast cultural reservoir of constitutive self-determination was unchained which would eventually prove vital in freeing radical Black subjectivity from becoming ‘fixed’ and ultimately trapped in yet another form of ‘objecthood’, which the prevailing and decidedly vulgar materialist perspective inherent throughout modernity before the advent of the Harlem Renaissance required. “In order to eliminate subjectivity, the materialist declares that he is an object, that is, the subject matter of science. But once he has eliminated subjectivity in favor of the object, instead of seeing himself as a thing among other things buffeted about by the physical universe, he makes himself an objective beholder and claims to contemplate nature as it is, in the absolute.” [16]

Western imperialist power, whether expressed in advanced neo-liberal capitalism, military bureaucratic communism, or naked fascism, cannot be effectively confronted or overcome through adherence to a set of deterministic presuppositions which are themselves derived solely from established structures of meaning and sanctioned epistemological foundations of a western imperialist continuum. The “racial mythology that accompanied capitalist industrial formation and provided its social structures engendered no truly profound alternatives. The social, ideological, and political oppositions generated within Western societies have proven unequal to the task” [17] and global scope of authentic human liberation.

By privileging a ‘fixed’ imperial anthropology of Man-as-rational animal, as mere ‘objecthood’ and ‘empirical self’ within a materialist eschatology of deterministic revolution, Revolt becomes exclusively enclosed within the normative gaze of modernity and suffocates any emancipatory potentialities that human ‘being’ might awaken, therefore ensuring that any genuine socio-historical movement towards human liberation has no ontological breath from which to sustain itself.

In the preface to the latest edition of The New Negro, Rampersad correctly states that Locke’s text helped Harlem turn its back more firmly on radical social movements. However, Rampersad’s adherence to such conventional wisdom encourages a discursive blindness towards the socio-ontological necessity and dialectical nature of such an important epistemological reorientation. Already having experienced the brutal reifying attempts at reducing our human ‘being’ to mere ‘objecthood’ through chattel slavery, Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ sustains the socio-ontological imperatives of an ascendant humanity and necessarily rejects ‘objecthood’ in all its manifestations. ‘Objecthood’, even when cloaked in an emancipatory narrative of impending class based revolution, is still nothing more than ‘being-in-itself’ overdetermined-from-without.

The assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ constitutes an exceptional antagonism in relation to modernity itself and therefore serves as a vast socio-ontological reservoir of insurgency for an ascendant humanity in continuous struggle and relentless confrontation with a western imperialist continuum. “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured both in the objectives and methods of conflict.” [18]

Seizing upon this moment of constitutive self-determination, Lockean ‘New Negro’ cultural resistance against racist dehumanization spiritually empowered and aesthetically functioned as a cultural pluralist fulcrum in discursive affirmation of an unbroken trajectory of Black Vindicationist historiography [19] originating with the seminal contributions towards Black liberation theory of David Walker and Frederick Douglass, which would subsequently assist in furthering a tremendous upsurge in historical anthropology, social archaeology and cultural genealogy aimed at disclosing the all too human legacy of Black people which had been first necessarily obscured, deformed and erased by a racist discourse and epistemology of established unjust global power, only to be reshaped and molded to fit the normative gaze of Empire. [20]

These efforts by Locke and DuBois however, no matter how socially effective in culturally preserving Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, ultimately ran the risk of necessarily limiting any immediate emancipatory political aims by having made the “frequent mistake” of trying “to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial domination.” [21] Indeed, it would not be until that era of global grassroots emancipatory social upheavals associated with Black liberation praxis (often analytically framed through perspectives of ‘civil rights’, ‘Black power’ and decolonization movements) that the insurgent trajectory of “new values” and imperatives unleashed by Locke and DuBois would resonate with enough historical momentum and discursive clarity, to be re-enunciated and actualized in continuous resistance against the structural-inert “framework” of western imperialist power.

Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, as urgently upheld over centuries with the constitutive self-determining strength of Atlas braced against the massive sky of oppressive racist dehumanization, is informed by a socio-ontological depth of emancipatory commitment towards resisting the structural-inert violence and miseducation of soul which is inscribed into modernity as imposed by western imperialist power. This geohistorical resistance is the genesis of an insurgent epistemological legacy which simultaneously validates potentialities for new paradigms of human ‘being’ and human liberation. “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former values and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.” [22]

[1] For an excellent collection of primary sources containing the discursive controversies and intellectual melees of that era involving A. Phillip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Cyril V. Briggs, Chandler Owen, Alain Locke, etc., see Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Theodore Vincent, (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1973).

[2] Alain Locke, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, (New York: Touchstone Book, 1925, 1992) p.4

[3] Locke, p.10.

[4] W.E.B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The Crisis Magazine, October 1926.

[5] DuBois, “Returning Soldiers”, The Crisis Magazine, May 1919.

[6] DuBois continues on “It is not a sufficient answer to say that capital encourages this oppression and uses it for its own ends. This may have excused the ignorant and superstitious Russian peasants in the past and some of the poor whites of the South today. But the bulk of white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and means to do it. William Green and Matthew Wolf of the A.F. of L. have no excuse of illiteracy to veil their deliberate intention to keep Negroes and Mexicans and other elements of common labor, in a lower proletariat as subservient to their interests as theirs are to the interests of capital.” DuBois, “Marxism and the Negro Problem”, The Crisis Magazine, May 1933.

[7] Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings, (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1962, 1988) p.118.

[8] Locke, The New Negro, p.11.

[9] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth(Grove Press: New York, 1961, 1963) and Jean-Paul Sartre,Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1(London: Verso, 1960, 1991).

[10] DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The Crisis Magazine, October 1926 (emphasis mine).

[11] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Vintage, 1966, 1994) p.261.

[12] DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: Dover, 1903, 1994) p.1-7.

[13] Walter F. White, “The Eruption of Tulsa”, The Nation, June 29, 1921; CXII, 909-10.

[14] DuBois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”, The New Negro, pp.386,402-403. Emphasis mine.

[15] Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 2008). Justifiably critical of DuBois and Locke’s dialectical gambit, Foley brilliantly examines the socio-historical tensions which informed the conditions that allowed Locke’s vision of “the New Negro as cultural pluralist” to supercede the Marxist vision of “the New Negro as class-conscious warrior”.

[16] Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution”, Literary and Philosophical Essays, (New York: Collier Books, 1955, 1967) p.202. Sartre continues, “There is a play on the word objectivity, which sometimes means the passive quality of the object beheld and, at other times, the absolute value of a beholder stripped of subjective weaknesses. Thus, having transcended all subjectivity and identified himself with pure objective truth, the materialist travels about in a world of objects inhabited by human objects.”

[17] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 2000) p.316.

[18] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.246. Emphasis mine.

[19] LaRose T. Parris, Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015) pp.4-8.

[20] Check out Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, (African American Images, 1933, 2000), J.A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color Vols.1&2, (New York: Touchstone, 1946, 1996). George G.M. James, Stolen Legacy, (African American Images, 1954, 2001). Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1967, 1974). John G. Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations, (New York: Citadel Press, 1970, 1990). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vols.1&2, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991).

[21] Fanon, p.244.

[22] Fanon, p.246.

excerpted from Being and Insurrection: Existential Liberation Critique, Sketches and Ruptures, (New York: Cannae Press, 2019) pp.68-87 and also used as the basis for a panel lecture delivered at the Black Radicalism in the United States Conference in April 2018 at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office and New York University