Time is slipping away, so we’ll have to modify our schedule a bit. We’re going to take a briefer look at the New Negro Movement and try to get a look at Ginsberg before the semester ends.
The video above of Duke Ellington and his band playing one of their most famous songs – – “Take the A Train” – – illustrates for me one central dynamic of the New Negro Movement: a radical embrace of and remaking of modernity. We’ve seen trains (or subway trains) as an emblem for the speed, anonymity, and spaces of modernity in Pound. Here, the record (a major technological shift in music) dissolves into the train wheel – – firmly placing us in modernity even before we see Duke and his band. Think about how jazz and jazz musicians are represented in the short video – – jazz is upbeat and dynamic and depends on the joyful but coordinated relations among sound, bodies, and emotions. The jazz musicians in their matching formalwear look sharp and professional. This is a music that aims for the future.
For Tuesday, read Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and Alain Locke’s “The New Negro.” Both are important manifestoes of the New Negro Movement and should give you a preliminary sense of the issues and debates that frame this explosion of Black creativity in the decades between 1920 and 1950 (or so). Make three annotations on each text. As you annotate, try to highlight and explicate the problems that both Hughes and Locke are trying to address – – especially as these problems are informed by the tension between tradition and modernity, folk and modern ways of thinking, popular and “refined” experience.