In 1925, after having won second prize in an Opportunity magazine contest for her short story “Drenched in Light,” the intrepid Zora Neale Hurston made her way from Eatonville, Florida, to the crowded streets of New York City in search, like so many other Southern migrants, of education and opportunity. Soon after her arrival in the city, she enrolled at Barnard College, where she studied anthropology with Franz Boas. It did not take long for Hurston to become a vital member of Harlem’s social and literary scene, even as she gained credentials as an anthropologist. In 1927, and again in...

In choosing to appropriate classical anthropology’s cultural pluralist, antiracist agenda, New Negro intellectuals intervened on a long history of anti-Black and anti-African rhetoric and practices that extended back before the nineteenth century, when the notion of a Great Chain of Being provided one measure of human civilization. This human taxonomy positioned Africans near or at the bottom of the social hierarchy and Europeans at the top, linking the status of the “lesser” races with their presumed fall from grace. When in the nineteenth century scientific rationales for theories of racial inferiority supplanted the theological frame that had previously been used...

Like Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois profoundly helped shape modern American thought on race and culture. As I have already mentioned, Du Bois’s 1897 speech “The Conservation of the Races” was a landmark moment in the development of cultural pluralism. Biographer David Levering Lewis credits Du Bois with first articulating the principles of cultural pluralism in this speech to the American Negro Academy, long before the terminology to describe cultural pluralism even existed.¹ Lewis writes:

The writings of James and Dewey would point the way for the “cultural radicals,” the pluralists of the near future, but the boldest...

Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois shifted the terms used to discuss race by foregrounding the cultural and historical conditions that determined racial formations. Inspired by their theoretical interventions, in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), James Weldon Johnson uses a racially indeterminate character to illustrate what it might mean to conceive of racial identity as a social and historical construct. In this and other ways, we see in his The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man the extent to which the social sciences filtered through the New Negro literary imagination.¹ In addition to redefining race to be...

James Weldon Johnson’s fiction implicitly challenged Race Men and Women to contend with class, gender, and regional differences within the race, despite the hegemonic tendency to view Black people monolithically.¹ Sterling Brown’s body of poetry introduces a new set of questions of concern to Renaissance intellectuals because rather than exploring the dynamics between the bourgeois and proletariat classes, he puts the imaginative visions of ordinary Black people at the center of his poetry, and considers what they had to say about the state of the race. Brown’s blues poetry puts him in the company of younger, more radical writers like...

Like Sterling Brown, Katherine Dunham’s youth and association with environs other than New York make her an unlikely subject to include in a study of a movement typically associated with Harlem in the twenties and thirties. While she was a young student at the University of Chicago between 1927 and 1936, however, Dunham’s intellectual formation was influenced by key figures associated with the movement, like Charles Johnson, and her artistic and social agenda mirrored those of New Negro artists and intellectuals including Hurston, Brown, Johnson, and Du Bois, all of which merits her inclusion in considerations of this period.¹ If...

Zora Neale Hurston’s southern roots and anthropological traing make her a key figure in this study. She and Katherine Dunham knew of each other and had even met when Hurston attended a party thrown by Dunham in Chicago, but personal differences and regional separation kept them largely apart. Nonetheless, their careers overlap in ways that are remarkable and noteworthy. Like Dunham, Hurston worked with Melville Herskovits, Franz Boas’s student and colleague. She assisted both men in the two summers preceding her graduation from Barnard by measuring the heads of African Americans in Harlem in order to disprove the assumption that...

After Zora Neale Hurston spent time immersed in Haitian society and Vodou culture, she recognized that African Americans and Haitians shared similar conflicts and concerns, but the ethnographic format denied her the opportunity to explore these commonalities. In fact, she appeared to believe that the genre demanded that she expand and exploit the perception of differences between American and Caribbean societies. Yet paradoxically, her sojourn in Haiti inspired Hurston to write Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in a creative outpouring that took only seven weeks, and came on the heels of a failed love affair. Their Eyes is a...

By focusing on five authors who portray different sites that represented to them African American culture, I have elucidated the ways that the ethnographic imagination informs New Negro literature, including the introduction of a set of figurative devices derived from anthropology (the construction of the field and the territorialization of culture, the ethnographic eye, and the participant-observer, for example). I have also examined how their identification with dual sites of identification, “native” and ethnographer (in some cases the assumption of such a guise is more figurative than literal), resulted in the emergence of a literary preoccupation with ways of seeing,...