The Harlem Renaissance’s New Negro concept shaped the Negritude movement through direct intellectual exchange

Evidence

Such interactive movements on the ground were accompanied respectively by the self-defining but also mutually influencing intellectual movements of the New Negro and Negritude. The New Negro, of course, dates back in definition to the earlier period of the Harlem Renaissance, its first formulation in an essay penned by the philosopher Alain Locke in 1925, “Enter the New Negro,” and later that year in Locke’s widely circulated edited book by the three-worded expression of that title. While emerging from overlapping intellectual and political sources, the discursive influence of “the New Negro” on the conception of the Negritude movement has been variously noted, indeed by principals such as Senghor himself. By the early 1930s, many of the primary writers of the Harlem Renaissance were being read by young African intellectuals studying in Europe, prompted by the presence both of black American cultural producers in Paris, London, and Berlin and of Caribbean and African intellectuals in New York. Aimé Césaire, the first to coin the term “Negritude,” in a poem in 1939, had actually written a dissertation in 1930 on the Harlem Renaissance, and was fully informed both regarding the conceptual apparatus and its intellectual, existential, and political commitments, adapting them to the specific conceptual conditions of African anticolonial and antiracist struggles. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the threatened-privilege generalization test by showing the same antiracist conceptual framework was adapted across distinct identity/geopolitical axes (US racial, African colonial), evidence that mobilization concepts travel across identity formations. — connects to: Negritude’s intellectual founding directly drew on the Harlem Renaissance — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 96

Broader Connections

• Negritude’s intellectual founding directly drew on the Harlem Renaissance #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 96