awareness of the discursive and symbolic uses to which the New Negro put constructions of the South. For example, in “The New Negro,” Alain Locke described the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North as a “deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern” (6). By relegating the South to medieval times, Locke signals its ultimate demise, a figuration that, one could argue, is necessary for the very constitution of a Harlem Renaissance. In other words, it is through the identification of “there and then” as backward that New Negro intellectuals could establish their “here and now” as progressive and forward-looking. Consequently, they took on a multilayered project: to document the cultural transformation that was occurring at the turn of the century, to preserve the remnants of what they perceived as a dying slave culture, and to interrogate the dynamics between the New Negro intellectual, the dominant culture, and the Black subjects of their art. Boasian anthropology—and by this I mean the intellectual tradition produced and practiced by Boas and his students—played an important role in this social and intellectual movement.
Because of their enthusiastic reception of social science theories, Black intellectuals played an active role in the Journal of American Folklore (JAFL) during the Renaissance years. For example, between 1917 and 1937, the JAFL dedicated fourteen issues, known as the “Negro Numbers,” to African American folklore. JAFL editors actively courted New Negro intellectuals like Arthur Huff Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, and Carter G. Woodson, who all contributed to the journal (Baker, From Savage to Negro 144). From its inception in 1888, Baker argues, the JAFL was committed to making African American folklore a central component of the society and its journal. Its initial organization included a department of Negro folklore and its editorial policy dedicated a quarter of the journal’s space to the subject. Newell, the JAFL’s first editor from 1888 to 1900, recruited Alice Bacon and the Hampton Folklore Society in order to get around the blatant racism and unprofessionalism of AFLS’s White southern members (Baker, From Savage to Negro 146). The society’s interest in African American folklore waned after Newell’s departure from his editorial post, but was revived in 1920 when Boas made a determined effort to develop the program in African American folklore and to train Black graduate students.45
The influence of social sciences was widely recognized by Black scholars during the early decades of the twentieth century. For example, Alain Locke, in two 1935 book reviews for the journal Opportunity (both entitled “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism”), links art and the social sciences in their abilities to end ideologies of White supremacy. In the January “retrospective review of the Literature of the Negro for 1934,” Locke praises Nancy Cunard’s Negro, An Anthology, among other literary works produced that year for hurling “shell, bomb and shrapnel at the citadel of Nordicism.”46 The second of this two-part article was published a month later, and in it Locke argues that sociology and, even more importantly, anthropology have set their sights on “Nordicism” through “scientific encirclement and bombardment.”47 The appeal of Boas’s assault on scientific racism is clearly articulated by Locke, but his review also makes clear the point at which the New Negro agenda began to diverge from that of Boas’s own, namely in Locke’s unabashed enthusiasm for the notion that the social sciences might be used as an instrument in the service of social reform, as a weapon to combat White supremacy. Boas’s anti-racist, liberal politics were certainly well known, as he did not hesitate to voice them in conversations, letters, and essays written for popular publication. Yet he also resisted the politicization of scholarship such as that suggested by Locke in “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism.” Boas considered objectivity a necessary prerequisite for academics to maintain their integrity. Baker astutely notes, however, that New Negro intellectuals’ keen awareness of the “racial politics of culture” made them less wary than Boas of using anthropology to try to reform social attitudes about race:
Schomburg, Fauset, Hurston, Woodson, and to a certain extent Locke pressed into service the liberal politics, relativistic orientation, and credentials of anthropologists who limited their exploration of African American culture to research and academic journals. Although the intellectuals of the movement were always careful scientists and historians or creative artists and performers, they were clear that scholarship and performance by and about black people involved political stakes that were entwined and woven into the very fabric of the movement to transform race relations and the meaning of being black in America. (Baker, “Research” 74)
The New Negro intellectuals’ investment in a collective project of social reform, their exploration of the limits and possibilities in racial solidarity, and their celebration of “race consciousness” are all areas where they diverge from Boas’s application of his theories on race and culture; yet, they were indebted to Boasian anthropology for the concepts, vocabulary, and the modes of representation that they used to advance their agenda of racial reform and uplift through artistic achievement.48
This agenda led Arthur Fauset (novelist Jessie Fauset’s brother), for example, to underscore the African origins of Negro folklore, and to argue that both varieties of tales were endowed with the same fundamental traits of “human kinship and universality.”49 The building blocks of race pride can be ascertained in his declaration that, alluding to Aesop’s fabled African origins, “Africa in a sense is the home of the fable; the African tales are its classics” (243). Fauset was a highly trained and rigorous folklorist whose orientation reflected the ideology of the American Folklore Society’s leaders. He shunned literary embellishment of folk materials, for example, and privileged authentic recreation as opposed to interpretation. Thus Fauset minimized the role of the storyteller in his presentation of the folktale, arguing, “as in the case of all true folk tales, the story teller himself was inconsequential; he did not figure at all—a talking machine might serve the purpose just as well” (240). Certainly, there are differences that can be ascertained among the stances and approaches taken by the various New Negro intellectuals. A figure like Hurston was supremely unconcerned with the blurring of disciplinary and generic boundaries, whereas Sterling Brown can be aligned with Fauset because he too, insisted (this time from a poet’s point of view) that literature not be confused with sociological materials.
Writers and intellectuals like these found numerous points of engagement with folklore, anthropology, and ethnography, yet they did not always feel compelled to follow the proscribed methods of these disciplines because their aims differed from that of Boas and his students, who set out to redefine culture. As Lee Baker astutely observes, the New Negro intellectuals emphasized, in addition, the racial politics of culture (From Savage to Negro 168–87). Boas viewed relativism, for example, as a means of enhancing the fieldworker’s objectivity while conducting research, not as an instrument for promoting racial or cultural pride. But Black intellectuals used the nonhierarchical, relativistic view of culture to formulate and articulate a discrete “race consciousness” that bound Black people together through their common heritage in Africa and shared goals of social advancement and emancipation. According to Baker, “Artists and intellectuals turned to the blues and spirituals, holiness churches and ring shouts, as well as other traditional cultural practices to offer an empowering way to transform segregation into a form of congregation by challenging the derogatory assessments that the culture of rural Negroes was backward and inferior” (“Research” 73). But in “The Mind of Primitive Man,” published in the Journal of American FolkLore, Boas explained how a relativist orientation was best suited for use in the field: “the student must endeavor to divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into which he is born. He must adapt his own mind, so far as feasible, to that of the people whom he is studying. The more successful he is in freeing himself from the bias based on the group of ideas that constituted the civilization in which he lives, the more successful he will be in interpreting the beliefs and actions of man.”50 The connections between Boas’s theories and his desire for social justice are obvious. Nonetheless, he treated with suspicion attempts at merging scholarship with social reform because he feared losing his objectivity. Thus he preferred to write dispassionate reports on fieldwork to anything that suggested propaganda.51
