Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance - Paperback

by J. Martin Favor (Author)

What constitutes "blackness" in American culture? And who gets to define whether or not someone is truly African American? Is a struggling hip-hop artist more "authentic" than a conservative Supreme Court justice? In Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor looks to the New Negro Movement--also known as the Harlem Renaissance--to explore early challenges to the idea that race is a static category.
Authentic Blackness looks at the place of the "folk"--those African Americans "furthest down," in the words of Alain Locke--and how the representation of the folk and the black middle class both spurred the New Negro Movement and became one of its most serious points of contention. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from such figures as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker as well as theorists Judith Butler and Stuart Hall, Favor looks closely at the work of four Harlem Renaissance fiction writers: James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer. Arguing that each of these writers had, at best, an ambiguous relationship to African American folk culture, Favor demonstrates how they each sought to redress the notion of a fixed black identity. Authentic Blackness illustrates how "race" has functioned as a type of performative discourse, a subjectivity that simultaneously builds and conceals its connections with such factors as class, gender, sexuality, and geography.

Back Jacket

J. Martin Favor has done the field of African American literary and cultural studies a profound service. His readings of Harlem Renaissance texts challenge our assumptions about racial identity and the ways our assumptions have shaped how we read literature by Black writers.--Herman Beavers, author of "Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson"

Author Biography

J. Martin Favor is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College.