Locke’s New Negro Movement rejected Western avant-garde in favor of African sources

Evidence

By creating the New Negro Movement, Locke advocated the importance of Africa as an aesthetic and iconographic source of inspiration and called for the rejection of modern trends in art and the avant-garde of Paris or New York, Paris being then the world center of Western art. In the midst of this “double consciousness,” the Harlem Renaissance, for the first time, allowed African-American artists and writers to think of their art according to independent criteria defined by the determination to separate themselves from the mainstream culture. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2878

Categorization

• XREF: Locke’s Afrocentric rejection of Parisian avant-garde parallels how ‘double consciousness’ is invoked in Du Bois scholarship already in the reading list.
• ADDENDUM: This rejection of the Western avant-garde for a rooted cultural identity parallels the ways dress norms in the immodesty essay served identity and political signaling.