Explore the vast range of titles available.

In Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond, Alain Locke—the central promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, America's most famous African American pragmatist, the cultural referent for Renaissance movements in the Caribbean and Africa—is placed in conversation with leading philosophers and cultural figures in the modern world. The contributors to this collection compare and contrast Locke's views on values, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and American and world citizenship with philosophers and leading cultural figures ranging from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, James Farmer, William James, John Dewey, José Vasconcelos, Hans G. Gadamer, Fredrick Nietzsche, Horace Kallen, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) to the cultural and political figure of Barack Obama. This important collection of essays eruditely presents Locke's views on moral, emotional, and aesthetic values; the principle of tolerance in managing value conflict; and his rhetorical style, which conveyed his views of cultural reciprocity and tolerance in the service of the values of citizenship and cosmopolitanism. For teachers and students of contemporary debates in pragmatism, diversity, and value theory, these conversations define new and controversial terrain.

The paper explores Alain Locke's views on Black American art. I look at what he thought constitutes Black American art and what he took good Black American art to achieve. As for the former, I examine two ways of looking at Black American art: (1) as defined by artists' expression of the emotional state or inner lives of Black Americans, and (2) as defined by certain formal qualities of the work itself. I show that Locke melded these two positions together in a unique way. In my discussion of what Locke took good Black American art to achieve, I engage (1) with his general theory of value, (2) with his thinking on aesthetic and artistic values more specifically, (3) with his metaphysics of race, before addressing his thoughts on what constitutes Black American art simpliciter , and on what it achieves when it is good art.

This essay explores Alain Locke's value theory in relation to his defense of beauty in the 1920's \"beauty vs. propaganda\" debate. Animated by a pragmatic commitment to resolving real-life value conflicts, many theories of valuation—including those proposed by Ralph Barton Perry and John Dewey—explored the question of whether values can be formed beyond interest and whether they can be arranged in a single hierarchy and compared. Locke turned to transvaluation—changes in value category—as a potential resolution for real-life value conflicts. This essay examines how Locke's philosophical work as a value theorist can be brought in relation to his other forays into African American cultural politics: mainly, his unremitting defense of beauty and cultural production even in the face of more urgent imperatives like civil and political rights.

This article argues that women poets writing in the Harlem Renaissance marshaled the communal connotations of ballad form and genre to enter covertly into and influence the masculine domain of Black cultural nationalism. The elasticity of the ballad enabled Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, and Gwendolyn Bennett to articulate a subject position wherein Black women could contribute to the effort to cultivate a New Negro consciousness as Black women poets. This reading shows that the respectability politics of their conventional poems overlay demands for racial and gender justice and sovereignty.

The panel aimed both to situate the event as a mechanism for adding dimension to the exploration of dramaturgy and cultural practice and to prompt new discussions that might bring depth and light to the national conversation on race.' Despite the proliferation of practicing Black dramaturgs and theories regarding Black theatre and performance, there has yet to be a study dedicated to the practice of Black dramaturgy-that is, a dramaturgical framework that shapes and is shaped by the perspectives drawn from Black theory and Black life and living. For Du Bois, theatre has the capacity to imbue Black communities with social and political power and can serve as a corrective to the harm perpetuated by systems of white supremacy, racism, and anti-Blackness. Ndounou refers to this practice as \"dramaturgical meritocracy,\" which involves valuing the creative labors of \"neglected peoples\" through using theatre and dramaturgy as a way to advocate for social and political rights, equity, and justice.!® Coopers essay \"The Negro' Dialect\" (ca. 1930), for instance, presents dramaturgical analysis for consideration.

The magazine's presentation of Jim Crow ideology as \"an organic phenomenon rather than as a consciously developed social structure predicated on inequality, dehumanization, and theft\" was vigorously contested by contemporary Black American writers and readers of the day, but it has escaped serious critical attention until now (7). Lorimer's racist project took globalist form in Cohen's series of stories, published between 1924 and 1930, featuring a globetrotting race film company, the Midnight Motion Picture Company. Circulating Jim Crow is a brilliant, original book, which formulates a supple theoretical framework for interpreting the \"shadow\" cast by white supremacist cultures remade for the modern era of consumerism, airplane travel, cinema, and mass circulation periodicals. \" (https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914- 1945/vol20_2024_gasston_review_maher?path=vol20_2024_contents)

In this essay, I respond to Chris Voparil's reconstruction of Richard Rorty's engagement with Josiah Royce's pragmatism in chapter 4 of Reconstructing Pragmatism. I first express my thoughts about Voparil's three main claims about Rorty's reconstruction of Royce's pragmatism. I then mention what I took to be the least interesting part of this chapter. Finally, I propose that Alain Locke's pragmatism, and more specifically his approach to resolving conflicting loyalties and his appropriation of Royce's concept of wise provincialism, could function as a bridge between Royce's absolute pragmatism and Rorty's pragmatism. Readers should take the last part of this essay as a prolegomenon to a study of Locke's appropriation of Royce's concept of wise provincialism.

Schomburg's writing on the archive over the course of his career demonstrates his continued efforts to articulate the project to which he dedicated his life: Black archives. In the same spirit, this essay looks at two of his works on Black archival theory: \"The Negro Digs Up His Past\" (1925), which espouses a counterarchival imperative rooted in New Negro ideology, and \"Racial Integrity\" (1913), which introduces a more radical theory of Black archives that better reflects his own collecting philosophy and archival legacy. Reading his distinct theorizations closely, the essay considers how Black archives navigate the tension between material evidence, belonging, and race on their own terms and in their own \"turn.\"

Set during the US construction of the Panama Canal, Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death paints a gruesome picture of the circum-Caribbean and challenges the picturesque image of the region as a tropical paradise. Contextualizing Walrond’s short stories within the modernizing project of canal-building, this essay argues that Tropic Death reframes the iconography of the Caribbean and evokes the archipelagic imaginary to rupture the myth of US continental exceptionalism. By reclaiming the erased history of the Caribbean’s violent inscription into global modernity, Tropic Death centers issues of race, colonialism, and transoceanic labor history in the context of the global expansion of modernist studies.

In 1914, a Long Island-born writer named Olivia Ward Bush published a volume of poetry called Driftwood . The efficacy of art often comes under pressure during periods of political turmoil and change, and Bush’s post-Reconstruction era is no exception. Driftwood draws especially provocative parallels between the reverie that poetry encourages and the rhetoric of progress and uplift that characterized the incipient New Negro Movement. Decades before Langston Hughes questioned what happens to a dream deferred, Bush used her craft to explore when dreaming was inspiriting and when it was ineffectual. This essay argues that Driftwood demonstrates how supplying space for aesthetic expression and freeing the mind to range for its own sake can itself be politically generative.