Escape from New York : the New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem

455 Pages·2013·9.55 MB·English

by  Baldwin

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

ESCAPE FROM
NEW YORK
THE NEW NEGRO RENAISSANCE
BEYOND HARLEM
Davarian L. Baldwin and
Minkah Makalani, Editors
Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as Yuichiro Onishi, “The
New Negro of the Pacific: How African Americans Forged Solidarity
with Japan, 1917–1922,” Journal of African American History 92, no.
2 (2007): 191–213; reprinted with permission of the Journal of African
American History. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as
Emily Lutenski, “‘A Small Man in Big Spaces’: The New Negro, the
Mestizo, and Jean Toomer’s Southwestern Writings,” MELUS: Multi-
ethnic Literature of the United States 33, no. 1 (2008): 11–32; reprinted
with permission of MELUS.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Escape from New York : the New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem
Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7738-2 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7739-9 (pb)
1. Blacks—Race identity—History—20th century. 2. African
Americans—Race identity—History—20th century. 3. Blacks—
Social conditions—20th century. 4. African Americans—Social
conditions—20th century. 5. Blacks—Intellectual life—20th
century. 6. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century.
7. Harlem Renaissance—Influence. 8. Harlem Renaissance—Social
aspects.  I. Baldwin, Davarian L., author, editor of compilation.
II. Makalani, Minkah, author, editor of compilation.
GN645.E79 2013
305.896'073—dc23
2013021788
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and
employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword ix
Robin D. G. Kelley
Introduction: New Negroes Forging a New World 1
Davarian L. Baldwin
I. THE DIASPORIC OUTLOOK
1. “Brightest Africa” in the New Negro Imagination 31
Jeannette Eileen Jones
2. CubanNegrismo, Mexican Indigenismo: Contesting
Neocolonialism in the New Negro Movement 53
David Luis-Brown
3. An International African Opinion: Amy Ashwood
Garvey and C. L. R. James in Black Radical London 77
Minkah Makalani
II. NEW (NEGRO) FRONTIERS
4. The New Negro’s Brown Brother: Black American and
Filipino Boxers and the “Rising Tide of Color” 105
Theresa Runstedtler
5. The New Negro of the Pacific: How African Americans
Forged Solidarity with Japan 127
Yuichiro Onishi
6. “A Small Man in Big Spaces”: The New Negro, the
Mestizo, and Jean Toomer’s Southwest 157
Emily Lutenski
III. THE GARVEY MOVEMENT
7. Making New Negroes in Cuba: Garveyism as
a Transcultural Movement 183
Frank Guridy
8. Reconfiguring the Roots and Routes of New Negro
Activism: The Garvey Movement in New Orleans 205
Claudrena Harold
IV. ENGENDERING THE EXPERIENCE
9. Black Modernist Women at the Parisian Crossroads 227
Jennifer M. Wilks
10. A Mobilized Diaspora: The First World War and
Black Soldiers as New Negroes 247
Chad Williams
11. Climbing the Hilltop: In Search of a New Negro
Womanhood at Howard University 271
Treva Lindsey
12. New Negro Marriages and the Everyday
Challenges of Upward Mobility 291
Anastasia Curwood
V. CONSUMER CULTURE
13. “You Just Can’t Keep the Music Unless You Move with It”:
The Great Migration and the Black Cultural Politics of
Jazz in New Orleans and Chicago 313
Charles Lester
14. New Negroes at the Beach: At Work and Play
outside the Black Metropolis 335
Andrew W. Kahrl
VI. HOME TO HARLEM
15. “Home to Harlem” Again: Claude McKay and the
Masculine Imaginary of Black Community 361
Thabiti Lewis
16. Not Just a World Problem: Segregation, Police Brutality,
and New Negro Politics in New York City 381
Shannon King
VII. SPEAKEASY: REFLECTING ON THE NEW NEW NEGRO
STUDIES
17. TheConjunctural Field of New Negro Studies 401
Michelle Ann Stephens
18. Underground to Harlem: Rumblings and
Clickety-Clacks of Diaspora 415
Mark Anthony Neal
19. The Gendering of Place in the Great Escape 421
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Acknowledgments 429
Contributors 431
Index 435
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Foreword
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
“We, the soldiers of the national liberation front of America, in the name of the
workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country have struck a fatal blow
to the racist police state!” So declared a young female revolutionary in the 1981
dystopian thriller Escape from New York, as she hijacked Air Force One with the
president on board. The year is 1997. Manhattan had been turned into a maximum
security prison, and our erstwhile rebel aims to bring the plane down on the be-
leaguered island so that the president can “perish in the inhuman dungeon of his
own imperialist prison.” Feeding off the revolutionary movements and political
scandals of the 1970s, Escape from New York is a story of political corruption,
empire, repression, rebellion, and the dark side of modernity. It anticipates the
neoliberal security state, predicts a future that is now our present nightmare, and
imagines a new generation who resists the status quo and recognizes that the real
criminals are those in power.
Although Minkah Makalani and Davarian L. Baldwin adopted the film’s title
as a not-so-subtle critique of the New York–centric focus of studies on the “New
Negro,” I suspect there is more being invoked here than meets the eye. The “New
York” to which the film refers is not a city but a metaphor for the whole U.S. em-
pire—its brutal, repressive regime, its racial character, its centrality to finance
capital, its global reach. The dialectics of Empire also breeds its own gravedig-
gers: movements that reject racial hierarchy, refuse victimization, and declare the
humanity of the ruled while exposing the inhumanity of the rulers.
Herein lies the book’s most critical insight, that is, that the New Negro was the
product of a particular historical convergence—the expansion of U.S. and European
empires, settler colonialism, an increasingly industrialized racial capitalism, and
their attendant processes: expropriation, proletarianization, massive migration,
urbanization, rapid technological development, and war. The New Negro, in
other words, was not exceptional but a manifestation of the same forces that
produced revolutionary upheavals in Mexico, Russia, Ireland, China, Germany,
India, Algeria, Egypt, the Arab world under the Ottoman Empire, South Africa,
ix