The Harlem Renaissance portrays the age of the New Negro, inspired by a new sense of self and race. Emerged from slavery, the New Negro is the new social subjectivities of the emergent educated elites. The newness of the New Negro stemmed largely from...
The Harlem Renaissance portrays the age of the New Negro, inspired by a new sense of self and race. Emerged from slavery, the New Negro is the new social subjectivities of the emergent educated elites. The newness of the New Negro stemmed largely from an aggressive claim to political inclusion, economic and cultural participation, and fundamental equality. The purpose of this paper is to examine identity and race issues of New Negroes in the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro made the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s the culmination of political, social and cultural debates about the status of blacks in the U.S.
The question of the individual in relation to race was one of the main points of debate among African-American artists. They have been caught between their private selves and their public roles. And they were torn between black and white identities. DuBois said the black person in America is burdened with "a double-consciousness ... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body." The black man was victim of this dilemma that he is both an American and something apart. Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance. However, their ideas of race and of New Negroes' roles and identities were very different. Countee Cullen said that he wanted simply to be a poet, not a Negro poet. In contrast, Langston Hughes links race and class issues. For him, Negro is a powerful and self-conscious cultural space of socially emergent group identity. Most of his poems are racial in theme, and he drew forms and techniques from blues and jazz.