Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar—though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings.
He finished a thesis—ultimately rejected by Oxford—on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son.
Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further-left members of the movement—notably Hughes and McKay—had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. Not unlike blackness itself. The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Locke demurred. His own past had begun to break painfully away.
Mary Locke died in , leaving Alain crushed and adrift. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit.
The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility—not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South.
The cities of the North awaited them—as did higher wages and white police. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro. But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals.
Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. The task that confronted any black modernist—after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War—was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past.
But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. After completing that in , I was consumed with other projects. It was really in the early s that I invested the time to write a true biography. So, the research has taken at least forty years, especially since I returned repeatedly to Howard University to study the voluminous letters that are the backbone of this biography.
From reading your biography, Locke appeared to be extremely self-conscious and grandiose, particularly around other Black men. Do you think he had a need to prove his superior intellect? How much of his life do you feel was an act, what percentage was an appearance of respectability?
I think Locke was most in competition with W. Du Bois, who carved out the path of Black public intellectual through stellar intellectual accomplishment, especially at Harvard.
I think Locke was relatively unique among the s black arts community for never questioning his homosexuality or masquerading as heterosexual, as for example, Countee Cullen, his young friend did by marrying Yolanda Du Bois. I also think it has a deeper impact: sexuality was really what he was most interested in; yet, he could not write about it for publication during his era. In some respects, not being able to write about what really mattered to him stunted his ability to be a creative writer, something he longed to be but never quite achieved.
How did his sexuality manifest in his contributions to social change and the Harlem Renaissance? I think that being gay made Locke distant and skeptical of the logic of Black protest that was the dominant form of Black aesthetics in the late s and early s. I think that Locke felt that constantly focusing on race and white racism at that left unexamined those aspects of Black life that did not fit the protest frame.
I also believe he felt that protest and NAACP cultural politics were heteronormative and marginalized stories that did not fit the NAACP strategy to craft Black stories that affirmed that Blacks were as middle class as other Americans. Being gay opened Locke to modernism, because it was in modernism that voices like his could be heard.
Locke sought a roomier notion of Black identity that could allow the queer and the unfixed notions of sexual identity to lurk if not flourish. Locke did not want Black America to create an alternative to White America that was as repressive and puritan as the mainstream. Locke spent time with Hughes in Europe romanticizing him, only to be abandoned by Hughes after a moment of intimacy. Zora was the one female writer of the Harlem Renaissance that Locke genuinely respected and sought to advance through a complicated patron scheme that also brought money to Hughes.
Yet Locke trashed it in a review. So, these were fierce enemies as well as trenchant allies in the struggle to create art that would endure. Dubois and Alain Locke. What type of progression were they looking for within the Black race? How did they substantiate their beliefs? Locke took that concept and turned it into something new—that the real talented tenth was the cadre of Black artists, who until him, were not foregrounded in discussions of Black politics, and made these artists the vanguard of change.
So, Locke can be credited with being the first member of the intellectual talented tenth to argue and define a role for the artists as members of the talented tenth whose art could make a difference for the masses of Black people.
After reading your biography, I was left with the impression that Locke enjoyed being in the public eye, and spent a lifetime seeking prestige. Would you say that it was validation and acceptance that he sought or did he really model himself as an influential intellect? I think both were motivators for him—to be validated and accepted—recognition being so difficult to achieve for a talented Black person, then and now—and the desire to be an influential intellectual.
Really, Locke, after Du Bois, was the first to suggest that intellectual brilliance was a road to fame—one seldom taken in America, as we can see from our current cultural moment. Certainly, wining the Rhodes Scholarship and being the first African American to do so put a stamp on him of intellectual prestige that made him singular and famous. Of these three candidates for the foundation of Negro art Locke claims each has had its day depending on the social environment that was prevalent at the time.
Locke dismisses nearly out of hand the first option remarking that many a Negro artist has produced the most amateurish works of art due primarily to their poor mastery of Negro idioms, and inadequate treatment of Negro themes. What is more, some white or at least non-Negro artist have been quite adept in either their use of characteristically Negro styles, or their dealings with Negro motifs.
Of course, it stands to reason that artist steeped in the cultural, ethnic and racial environments that give rise to these idioms and themes are most likely to master their use and expression, and that persons who do so are most likely to be members of these communities, having the same racial, ethnic or cultural identities as other members.
Locke understood race as primarily a product of social culture. Locke denies as do nearly all contemporary race theorists that races are biologically distinct categories of human beings. Locke maintained that culture and race were distinct, but often overlapping categories.
There is no tight causal or otherwise necessary connection between race and culture. The two are mutually exclusive even though they do sometimes vary together or otherwise correspond. Race, for Locke, is not determinative of culture or civilization. This is primarily a cautionary observation on Locke's part seeing as how.
Locke has some hesitation about the prudence and possibility of completely eradicating racial categories. He states,. Locke attributes the original idea that race is a primary determining factor in culture to the work of Arthur de Gobineau, though he thinks the main scientific justification for the view has been offered by those who seek to interpret culture in evolutionary terms such as the social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.
Positing a fixed link between race and culture was useful for such theorists in developing a step-by-step account of the development of cultures. But even in Locke's day, the supposed scientific foundations of such theoretical positions faced challenges.
In light of that Locke thinks it understandable for some to want to correct this misinterpretation of the facts by insisting that there is no connection at all between race and culture. We see here again perhaps some of the influence that pragmatist thinkers, in this case Dewey, may have had on Locke, as Dewey was apt to point out on numerous occasions the shortcomings of Spencer's social Darwinism, and chiefly its attempt to offer a universal account of all aspects of human development.
Locke worried that extreme cultural relativism. Locke held that race was in point of fact a social and cultural category rather than a biological one. For this reason he developed the notion of ethnic race or culture group. By ethnic race, I take Locke to mean a peculiar set of psychological and affective responsive dispositions, expressed or manifested as cultural traits, socially inherited and able to be attributed through historical contextualization to a specifiable group of people.
The concept of ethnic race is a way of preserving the demonstrated distinctiveness of various groupings of human beings in terms of characteristic traits, lifestyles, forms of expression; without resulting to the scientifically invalidated notion of biological race.
The notion of ethnic race is better able to capture the myriad differences between culture groups in terms of the actual social, cultural and historical conditions that give rise to such variation, and without the scientifically indefensible reliance on biological factors.
On this view, race is no longer thought to be the progenitor of culture; instead race is understood to be a cultural product. Locke held that the more objective analysis of culture he advocated would likely result in the development over time of distinctive culture-types for which it may prove possible to work out some principle of development or evolution.
Nearly every culture is highly composite; consisting as most due in the union of various social and historical influences; moreover, every ethnic group in the unique outcome of a specific social history. A more scientific understanding of man replaces the abstract artifice of biological race, and requires that we deal with concrete culture-types which are frequently complex amalgamations of supposed races united principally by entrenchment of customary reactions, standardized practices, traditional forms of expression and interaction, in sum, the specific history of a given people in a particular place.
Locke quickly notes while the notion of race has been invalidated as an explanation of culture groups understood as totalities, race does help to explain various cultural components within a given culture. James, William pragmatism race relativism value theory. Chronology 2. Pluralism 3. Relativism 4. Aesthetics 5. Philosophy of Race 6. Though he was a member of the faculty at the time Locke never actually studied with William James.
Even though he held a right to admittance to an Oxford college as a Rhodes Scholar he encountered some difficulty in this regard until he was finally admitted to Hertford College.
While at Oxford Locke studied philosophy, Greek, and literature. While at the University of Berlin Locke deepened his interest in value theory, particularly in the work of theorists such as Alexius Meinong, Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels, and Frantz Brentano.
December of that year Locke publishes The New Negro : An Interpretation perhaps his most famous work and earns himself recognition as a leading African-American literary critic and aesthete.
Johnson, the university's first African-American president. Kallen and Sidney Hook. We must realize more fully that values create these imperatives as well as the more formally super-imposed absolutes, and that norms guide our behavior as well as guide our reasoning. VI 34 Values are an important and necessary part of human experience. He writes: [t]he common man, in both his individual and group behavior, perpetuates the problem in a very practical way. He sets up personal and private and group norms as standards and principles, and rightly or wrongly hypothesizes them as universals for all conditions, all times and all men.
VI 35 Valuations of multiple kinds pervade nearly every aspect of our lives; our aesthetic, moral and religious evaluations and judgments. On Locke's estimation, the gravest problem of contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of intolerance and mass coercion.
VI 36 This is the central and driving question of Locke's axiology and as such it points to some of the crucial aspects of his overall philosophical view, but his theory of value specifically, and importantly his social and political philosophy.
He writes the value-mode establishes for itself, directly through feeling, a qualitative category which, as discriminated by its appropriate feeling-quality, constitutes an emotionally mediated form of experience. VI 38 There is a particular feeling or feeling-quality associated with each value-mode. Locke writes, [f]lesh and blood values may not be as universal or objective as logical truth or schematized judgments, but they are not thereby deprived of some relative objectivity and universality of their own.
The basic qualities of values…pertain to psychological categories. They are not grounded in types of realms of value, but are rooted in modes or kinds of valuing.
VI 38 Locke is aware that it is not easy to demonstrate that the fundamental identity and unity of a value-mode depends on a feeling-quality. Commenting on his own preference for a functional theory of value Locke writes: I confess at the outset to a preference for a functional theory of value, but my brief for a functional analysis of value norms is not completely parti pris , but is made rather because a functional approach, even should it lead to a non-functionalist theory of value, of necessity treats the value varieties in terms of their interrelationships, guaranteeing a comparative approach and a more realistic type of value analysis.
FVVU 81 Moreover, a functional account of value has the theoretical advantages of being able to account for parallels between values, value interchangeability, and transvaluation. He writes: [t]he further we investigate, the more we discover that there is no fixity of content to values, and the more we are bound, then, to infer that their identity as groups must rest on other elements.
VI 40 The feeling-quality of a given value necessarily establishes the mode of valuation, i. Consummation in Creativity Artistic Fine—Unsatisfactory Joy Distress Locke explains value conflict in terms of a more fundamental psychological incompatibility.
Pluralism Locke's philosophical worldview is pervaded by a concern for diversity. Relativism Relativism, for Locke, begins as a systematic approach to the recognition of the sorts of value equivalence discussed earlier, and is then able to militate against the pernicious forms of valuing that often turn cultural exchanges into intractable problems.
The first of the three principles is: The principle of cultural equivalence , under which we would more wisely press the search for functional similarity in our analyses and comparisons of human cultures; thus offsetting our traditional and excessive emphasis upon cultural differences. CRIP 73 The effect of the first principle is to lay bare the fact that the seemingly vast differences between cultures is more a matter of our selective preferences; that is, the habits of mind we have cultivated for being more keenly attuned to difference rather than similarity.
CRIP 73 All value-types are independent of any given value-content; any given value-type can be joined with any value-content. Aesthetics Locke is perhaps best known for his work in aesthetics, in particular, his role as both an intellectual purveyor of Negro art and literary critic. NN 3—4 The primary consequence of this social environment on black aesthetics in the United States according to Locke was its Ghettoization.
Instead, The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest…The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions.
NN 6 The Great Migration brought with it a need for a plurality of social adjustments as the droves of African-Americans flooded into Northern cities.
Principal among this was the realization that the Negro was rapidly in process of class differentiation, [and] if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous.
NN 5—6 Negro life in America according to Locke is comprised of many diverse elements. Prior to that Locke claims that it must be admitted that the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience.
The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common.
NN 6—7 Locke explains that in part the artistic endeavors of the Negro have failed to achieve universal resonance because the Negro himself has been so poorly understood. Moreover, effort towards this will at least have the effect of remedying in large part what has been the most unsatisfactory feature of our present stage of race relations in America, namely the fact that the more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another NN 8—9 And in addressing that crucial fact, such efforts may go a long way towards facilitating an appreciation of Negro art as expressive both of the peculiar racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences of African-Americans, and as expressive of ubiquitous aspects of human experience.
Their realization has acquired a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its effects; at first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. Therefore, the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not NN And since, according to Locke, [d]emocracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed…the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other.
The experiences of young American Negroes is uniquely representative because [a]ll classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. NN 47 Here we find an interesting problem in Lockean exegesis: How is it that the aesthetic contribution is at once characterized by a disavowal of representativeness, while at the same time being uniquely representative?
Locke goes on to note that [r]acial expression as a conscious motive, it is true, is fading out of our latest art, but just as surely the age of truer, finer group expression is coming in—for race expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital. Indeed, at its best it never is. NN 50 This hampered both the individual expressivity of the older generation of artists as well as their ability to communicate cross culturally the truth of black experiences.
The spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America. But the very elements which make them uniquely expressive of the Negro make them at the same time deeply representative of the soil that produced them. Thus, as unique spiritual products of American life, they become nationally as well as racially characteristic. It may not be readily conceded now that the song of the Negro is America's folksong; but if the spirituals are what we think them to be, a classical folk expression, then this is their ultimate destiny.
Already they give evidence of this classic quality. Through their immediate and compelling universality of appeal, through their untarnishable beauty, they seem assured of the immortality of those great folk expressions that survive not so much through being typical of a group or representative of a period as by virtue of being fundamentally and everlastingly human.
NN The best evidence, Locke seems to think, in support of the spirituals' claim to universality is that they have withstood the test of time. Beyond this the spirituals have survived the contempt of the slave owners, the conventionalizations of formal religion, the repressions of Puritanism, the corruptions of sentimental balladry, and the neglect and disdain of second-generation respectability.
NN In short, they have successfully made the transition from folk art to formal music. Du Bois pointed out, and epic intensity and a tragic profundity of emotional experience, for which the only historical analogy is the spiritual experience of the Jews and the only analogue, the Psalms. NN But whatever they may lack in terms of poetic form, they more than compensate for in their ability to embody the religious mood.
In fact, Locke argues that [i]nteresting and intriguing as was Dr. Du Bois's analysis of their emotional themes, modern interpretation must break with that mode of analysis, and relate these songs to the folk activity that they motivated, classifying them by their respective song-types. NN In the case of the spirituals Locke is in favor of a different method of classification because contemporary interpreters of the Negro's music tend to mischaracterize, or characterize in a way that is not true to the folk that produced it, the music of the Negro.
NN However, discriminating Negro folk music into types on the basis of the folk activity that underlies them is not necessarily to exclude the emotive content of the song. NN 5. WWN Beyond this Locke thinks it a meaningful query to ask whether the racial concept has any place in art at all. WWN Locke sees this as the unfortunate consequence of the past need to proffer counter-stereotypes to combat demeaning stereotypes of Negro persons.
Philosophy of Race Locke understood race as primarily a product of social culture. This is primarily a cautionary observation on Locke's part seeing as how [i]t is too early to assume that there is no significant relationship between race and culture because of the manifestly false and arbitrary linkage which has previously been asserted. CRASC Locke has some hesitation about the prudence and possibility of completely eradicating racial categories.
He states, [i]n some revised and reconstructed form, we may anticipate the continued even if restricted use of these terms as more or less necessary and basic concepts that cannot be eliminated altogether, but that must nevertheless be so safe-guarded in this continued use as not to give further currency to the invalidated assumption concerning them.
CRASC Locke attributes the original idea that race is a primary determining factor in culture to the work of Arthur de Gobineau, though he thinks the main scientific justification for the view has been offered by those who seek to interpret culture in evolutionary terms such as the social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.
Locke worried that extreme cultural relativism leaves an open question as to the association of certain ethnic groups with definite culture traits and culture types under circumstances where there is evidently a greater persistence of certain strains and characteristics in their culture than of other factors.
CRASC 6. Most authorities are now reconciled to two things,—first, the necessity of a thorough-going redefinition of the nature of race, and second, the independent definition of race in the ethnic or social sense together with the independent investigation of its differences and their causes apart from the investigation of the factors and differentiae of physical race.
CRASC The notion of ethnic race is better able to capture the myriad differences between culture groups in terms of the actual social, cultural and historical conditions that give rise to such variation, and without the scientifically indefensible reliance on biological factors. CRASC Harris ed. The New Negro. Edited by Jeffrey C. Washington, D. Locke, A. Secondary Literature Bernasconi, R. Gracia ed.
Cain, R. Carter, J. Eze, C. Green, J. Harris, L. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Du Bois vs. Alain Locke on the Aesthetic. Kallen, H. Linnemann, R. MacMullan, T. Seme, P. Stewart, J. Washington, J.
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