阿兰·洛克

作品

• 1916种族接触与种族间关系

  霍华德大学的讲座：种族不是生物学事实，而是社会接触、冲突和历史的产物；直到1992年才出版。

• 1925新黑人：一种阐释

  来自哈莱姆的诗歌、小说、散文与艺术选集：一代人表现自己，而不是被他人表现。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations (lectures 1916, published 1992)
• The New Negro: An Interpretation (ed., 1925)
• “Art or Propaganda?” (1928)
• “Values and Imperatives” (1935)
• The Negro and His Music (1936)
• When Peoples Meet (ed. with Bernhard J. Stern, 1942)