The Philosophy of Alain Locke


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Important writings on cultural pluralism, value relativism, and critical relativism.




The New Negro


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Alain L. Locke


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Alain L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology TheNew Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited first biography of this extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century America’s cultural and intellectual life. Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke’s Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. Harris and Molesworth show that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities. The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this engaging account effectively reclaims Locke’s rightful place in the pantheon of America’s most important minds.




The New Negro


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The definitive biography of Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar and Harvard PhD in philosophy, Howard University philosophy scholar, and architect of the Harlem Renaissance, who mentored a generation of artists including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Nurston and promoted the work of African Americans as the quintessential creators of American modernism. This biography explores his professional and private life, including his relationships with white patrons and his lifelong search for love as a gay man.




Alain Locke


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The Works of Alain Locke


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With the publication of The New Negro in 1925, Alain Locke introduced readers all over the U.S. to the vibrant world of African American thought. As an author, editor, and patron, Locke rightly earned the appellation "Godfather of the Harlem Renaissance." Yet, his intellectual contributions extend far beyond that single period of cultural history. Throughout his life he penned essays, on topics ranging from John Keats to Sigmund Freud, in addition to his trenchant social commentary on race and society. The Works of Alain Locke provides the largest collection available of his brilliant essays, gathered from a career that spanned forty years. They cover an impressively broad field of subjects: philosophy, literature, the visual arts, music, the theory of value, race, politics, and multiculturalism. Alongside seminal works such as "The New Negro" the volume features essays like "The Ethics of Culture," "Apropos of Africa," and "Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy." Together, these writings demonstrate Locke's standing as the leading African American thinker between W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. The foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the introduction by




The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke


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This book provides a comprehensive overview of Alain Locke's pragmatist philosophy. It aims to capture the radical implications of Locke's approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke's works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed, and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed. Arguing that the school of thought Locke initiated is best described as critical pragmatism, the well-known philosopher and Locke scholar, Leonard Harris, provides a clear and thorough introduction to Locke's thought that will be useful to students and scholars alike. At a time when critical theory in all forms_post-Marxist, legal, race, and gender theory_is undergoing a major reassessment, this volume is especially timely. Locke's critical pragmatism arguably avoids the pitfalls of critical theory, anticipates its tremendous contribution to human liberation, and offers an alternative to the limitations of classical pragmatism. This volume introduces unique individual interpretations of Locke and critical reflections on his philosophy. Each author, in the spirit of Locke's critical temper, offers their own contribution to extremely difficult issues.




The New Negro Aesthetic


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Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the "Negro problem" and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves. The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke's Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a "being-in-the-world" that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really are: a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.




Race Contacts and Interracial Relations


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Race Contacts and Interracial Relations comprises five lectures that Alain Locke, Howard University professor of philosophy and critic of the Harlem Renaissance, delivered in 1916 at Howard University. Locke examines race and racism in twentieth-century social relations and provides a means of analyzing race and ethnic conflict in relation to economic and political changes in society. He suggests that a way to understand racial conflict is to look at nonracial issues that divide a society and at how race becomes a symbol of those issues and conflicts. Locke's early recognition and articulation of Franz Boas's theory of race in these lectures and his contention that racism is socially generated were intellectual departures at the time. While rejecting the biological basis of race, Locke proposes that the social concept of race could be employed by a minority as a cultural strategy for self-help and self-definition. Thus the lectures show that Locke's work in African American art and culture grew out of a considered analysis of race and modern society. In the introduction to this carefully edited volume, Jeffrey Stewart provides background on Alain Locke and other theorists on race whom Locke discusses, situates Locke's ideas on race within the context of his time, and relates Locke's lectures to his thought on art and culture and to contemporary arguments on race.




Philosophic Values and World Citizenship


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In Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond, Alain Locke—the central promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, America's most famous African American pragmatist, the cultural referent for Renaissance movements in the Caribbean and Africa—is placed in conversation with leading philosophers and cultural figures in the modern world. The contributors to this collection compare and contrast Locke's views on values, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and American and world citizenship with philosophers and leading cultural figures ranging from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, James Farmer, William James, John Dewey, José Vasconcelos, Hans G. Gadamer, Fredrick Nietzsche, Horace Kallen, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) to the cultural and political figure of Barack Obama. This important collection of essays eruditely presents Locke's views on moral, emotional, and aesthetic values; the principle of tolerance in managing value conflict; and his rhetorical style, which conveyed his views of cultural reciprocity and tolerance in the service of the values of citizenship and cosmopolitanism. For teachers and students of contemporary debates in pragmatism, diversity, and value theory, these conversations define new and controversial terrain.