from Mark A. Sanders, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

In a broader sense, much of New Negro oppositional rhetoric fails to reinvent concepts of race and identity, fails to construct a new tropic vocabulary independent of the prevailing rhetoric. (7)

Rather than simply a loose coalition of middle-class, northeastern politicos and intellectuals largely represented through the NAACP and the Urban League, the New Negro Movement constitutes the first politically self-conscious attempt on the part of African Americans to define themselves as a postslavery, postagrarian people. William Pickens ends his treatise on the New Negro with an apt summation of this political phenomenon: "The new Negro is a sober, sensible creature, conscious of his environment, knowing that not all is right, but trying hard to become adjusted to this civilization in which he finds himself by no will or choice of his own. . . . He still hopes that the unreasonable opposition to his forward and upward progress will relent. But, at any rate, he is resolved to fight, and live and die, on the side of God and the Eternal Verities." Thus, in short, the New Negro Movement constitutes a pervasive and encompassing transformation of self-identification cutting across class, regional, and educational boundaries. . . . As a result of massive migration from the rural South into the urban North and Midwest, a significant percentage of the African American population was, for the first time in history, no longer rural but urban. African American individual and cultural identity was forced to adjust to the new demands of the city and industrialization. As a result, African American culture entertained new concepts of individuality and tried to rationalize new feelings of alienation and ostensibly to assign value to its new surroundings. (11)

I stress here the importance of cultural indicators of transforming self-identification in order to move the discussion of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance beyond the narrow (and often mutually exclusive) enclaves of politics on the one hand and aesthetics on the other. Instead, we can describe the New Negro era as a dynamic, multivalent moment of radical transformation in African American consciousness and self-identification, a moment of self-conscious, self-declared modernity. The coming to fruition of an essential set of ideas claiming selfhood, political inclusion, cross-cultural participation, and fundamental humanity, this ideological and ideational transformation manifests itself in most, if not all, segements of African American life. (14)

. . . recognizing the critical interdependence of New Negroism and American modernity, Brown pursues an ultimately synthetic poetic project, exposing and dramatizing the dynamic hybridity fundamental to African American being. But in order to forge a project culling from modernist and New Negro formulations, he must confront and subvert the exclusinary nature of the racial discourse in which both hegemonic modernism and bourgeois New Negroism participate, the essentializing tendencies of both, and particularly modernism's construction fo "whiteness" predicated on blcack objectification. (16)