Alain Locke
Values grow out of feeling and culture, so they are many; the task is not to make them uniform but to let cultures meet on equal terms – and Black Americans should speak for themselves in their own art.
Placement
Philosopher at Howard University and the first African American Rhodes Scholar: values arise from feeling and differ between cultures without being arbitrary; race is a social and historical fact, not a biological one. His anthology “The New Negro” (1925) became the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance.
Key ideas
- Value pluralism and cultural relativism
- Race as social, not biological
- The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance
- Art as expression, not propaganda
Teachers: Georg Simmel
Influence
Influenced by 3
Alexius Meinong
influenced by
Locke’s theory of value, set out in his Harvard dissertation The Problem of Classification in Theory of Value (1918), drew on the Austrian value theory of Meinong, Ehrenfels and Brentano, which he had studied in Berlin in 1910–11. SEP “Alain LeRoy Locke”; A. Locke, The Problem of Classification in Theory of Value (dissertation, Harvard, 1918)
Evidence: AI draft
Alexius Meinong › 1853–1920
Franz Boas
influenced by
Locke drew on Boas’s critique of biological race concepts to treat race as a product of historical contact (Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations, lectures 1915–16, publ. 1992). A. Locke, Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations, ed. J. C. Stewart (lectures 1915–16; publ. 1992); SEP “Alain LeRoy Locke”
Evidence: AI draft
Franz Boas › 1858–1942
Georg Simmel studied with
studied with
Between Oxford and his Harvard doctorate, Locke studied at the University of Berlin in 1910–11 under Simmel and deepened his interest in the value theory of Meinong, Ehrenfels and Brentano. SEP “Alain LeRoy Locke”
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Simmel › 1858–1918
Influenced 2
Paulette Nardal
influenced
Paulette Nardal’s “The Awakening of Race Consciousness” (1932) describes a passage from imitation to race consciousness that parallels the phases in Locke’s The New Negro (1925); Locke was a visitor to the Nardal salon. P. Nardal, “L’éveil de la conscience de race chez les étudiants noirs”, La Revue du monde noir 6 (1932); T. D. Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (2002)
Evidence: AI draft
Paulette Nardal › 1896–1985
Léopold Sédar Senghor
influenced
Senghor echoed Locke’s The New Negro (1925) when he called the poets of his Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948) ‘Nègres-Nouveaux’. L. S. Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948); A. Locke (ed.), The New Negro (1925); A. Mangeon, Études littéraires africaines 29 (2010)
Evidence: AI draft
Léopold Sédar Senghor › 1906–2001
Criticism
Criticizes 2
W. E. B. Du Bois
criticised
Against Du Bois’s ‘all Art is propaganda’ (1926), Locke held that propaganda perpetuates group inferiority even in protest; art should be expression (‘Art or Propaganda?’, 1928). A. Locke, “Art or Propaganda?”, Harlem 1 (1928); W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The Crisis 32 (1926); SEP “Alain LeRoy Locke”
Evidence: AI draft
W. E. B. Du Bois › 1868–1963
Zora Neale Hurston influenced
influenced
Hurston joined Locke’s Stylus club at Howard (1921) and, on his recommendation, published in Opportunity; Locke included her ‘Spunk’ in The New Negro (1925). A. Locke (ed.), The New Negro (1925); R. E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977); V. S. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows (2003)
Evidence: AI draft
criticised
Locke called Their Eyes Were Watching God ‘folklore fiction at its best’ but urged a turn to ‘motive fiction and social document fiction’ (Opportunity, 1938). A. Locke, “Jingo, Counter-Jingo and Us”, Opportunity 16 (January 1938); Hurston’s reply, “The Chick with One Hen” (1938), remained unpublished
Evidence: AI draft
Zora Neale Hurston › 1891–1960
Works
Lectures at Howard University: race is not a biological fact but a product of social contact, conflict and history; published only in 1992.
An anthology of poetry, fiction, essays and art from Harlem: a generation that represents itself instead of being represented.
Position
Locke’s philosophy is a theory of value. Values, he argued in his dissertation and in “Values and Imperatives” (1935), are not found in objects but arise from feeling: a feeling-quality decides whether an experience is valued in a religious, moral, aesthetic or logical mode. Each mode produces its own imperatives, and conflicts begin when a group makes its own values absolute. Against such absolutism he defended value pluralism and a cultural relativism that he thought compatible with critical judgement: cultures produce different value systems, which can be understood and compared, and reciprocity rather than uniformity should govern their relations. In Race Contacts (1916) he argued that race is not a biological category but a social one, produced by contact and conflict, while a “social race” understood as cultural heritage can be a source of self-respect. The New Negro (1925) announced a generation that would represent itself in art instead of being represented, and urged artists to draw on African art and on Black folk traditions. Against Du Bois’s view that Black art should serve as propaganda for racial advance (“Criteria of Negro Art”, 1926), Locke held in “Art or Propaganda?” (1928) that art is first of all expression. The Négritude writers in Paris, among them Senghor, took up the Harlem Renaissance and The New Negro. Critics found his aesthetic programme elitist. Since Leonard Harris’s edition The Philosophy of Alain Locke (1989) he has been read again as a philosopher in his own right.
Life & context
Alain LeRoy Locke was born Arthur Locke in Philadelphia on 13 September 1885. From 1904 to 1907 he studied philosophy at Harvard with Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg and Ralph Barton Perry and graduated magna cum laude. In 1907 he became the first African American Rhodes Scholar and went to Hertford College, Oxford; in 1910–11 he studied in Berlin, among others with Georg Simmel. From 1912 he taught at Howard University in Washington, where in 1915–16 he gave the lectures Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations. In 1918 Harvard awarded him a doctorate for a dissertation on the classification of values, supervised by Perry. He edited the special issue “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” of the magazine Survey Graphic (March 1925) and expanded it into the anthology The New Negro. Howard dismissed him in 1925 after he supported equal pay for Black and white faculty; he returned in 1928 and taught there until 1953. He helped arrange the patronage of the white collector Charlotte Osgood Mason for Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, a relationship both writers later broke off. Locke was gay and lived this discreetly. He died in New York on 9 June 1954.
Further main works
- “Art or Propaganda?” (1928)
- “Values and Imperatives” (1935)
- The Negro and His Music (1936)
- When Peoples Meet (ed. with Bernhard J. Stern, 1942)
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