Some Penguin Classics feel like long-awaited companion volumes, and that certainly applies to one of the newest additions to the lineup: The New Negro Aesthetic, the selected writings of Alain Locke, the spiritual and philosophical godfather of the Harlem Renaissance. This new Penguin volume is edited by Jeffrey Stewart, and anybody who read is fantastic 2018 biography of Locke, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, would have finished it wanting very much to reach out a hand and find just this kind of book, a collection of Locke’s writing in an attractive, readily-available volume from one of the greatest publishers in the world. 

Stewart supplies both the Introduction and the notes for this volume, and they’re masterful. He finds Locke on vacation in San Remo, Italy, in 1924, reviewing possible inclusions for the magazine Survey Graphic and slowly developing an entirely new conception of the Negro aesthtetic experience, a process Stewart describes with his usual insight into this complex man:

Having observed from San Remo that the genius of Black people was to adopt circulation around the country as the mechanism of emancipation during the Great Migration, Locke applied that insight to himself and recognized that was what the New Negro aesthetic meant for the Negro of the future – one could create one’s own opportunity as a Black person by being a creative, and White people and Black people would pay you for it. While advocating Negro aesthetics as an emancipatory platform, Locke was forced to emancipate himself through intellectual labor, shooting out a rapid-fire succession of articles, making the period from 1925 to 1928 one of the most productive periods of critical writing in African American intellectual history.

A collection of Alain Locke’s writings, appearing in 2022 and using his own “New Negro” terminology, can’t help but be either intensely political or intensely aware of politics. The US is more explosively polarized on the subject of race than it’s been since the riots of 1968, and since it’s a polarization largely fueled by social media, it’s naturally a noxious combination of stupid and dangerous. Stewart is obliged to spend an entire note, for instance, on the Twitter-vetted rhetorical contortions currently attending what to call black people. “After the murder of George Floyd, and the protests that followed, the New York Times as well as other newspapers have begun to print “Black” with an uppercase first letter,” he writes. “In this document, I have sought to retain the nomenclature of the times while at the same time following the practice of the New York Times and capitalizing “Black” when referring to peoples of African descent.” So: Black is the new black. Check.

Fortunately, Locke’s own muscular eloquence, on display throughout this volume, is not subject to the whims dictated by the manufactured outrage of Twitter check-marks. This Penguin collection features some his best pieces, from the sheer power of “Enter the New Negro” to the thoughtful sensitivity of his tribute to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to his sweeping reviews of the state of Negro art in his day. Even pieces that seem more clearly to have been written at speed and mainly with spleen, such as “A Note on African Art,” ring with the man’s signature sharp style:

The significance of African art is contestable; at this stage it needs no apologia. Indeed no genuine art ever does, except when it has become encumbered with false interpretations. Having passed, however, through a period of neglect and disesteem during which it was regarded as crude, bizarre, and primitive, African art is now in danger of another sort of misconstruction, that of being taken up as an exotic fad and a fashionable amateurish interest. Its chief need is to be allowed to speak for itself, to be studied and interpreted rather than to be praised or exploited. It is high time that it was understood, and not taken as a matter of oddness and curiosity, or of quaint primitiveness and fantastic charm.

Jeffrey Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke is a masterful work of biography, one that every American should read, and now it has a perfect little companion volume – or maybe it IS the companion volume, to these writings by a towering American thinker.