When I conceived of this series of the collected essays of major thinkers in the African American tradition, I had two writers in mind: James McCune Smith and Alain Locke. James McCune Smith (1813–1865) earned three degrees from the University of Glasgow between 1835 and 1837, and was most probably, before W. E. B. Du Bois matriculated at Fisk and Harvard, the most well-educated and accomplished black man of letters in the nineteenth-century. His friend, Frederick Douglass, often commented upon his towering intellect, and asked him to write the introduction to his second slave narrative, “My Bondage and My Freedom.” McCune Smith was one of the most prolific essayists of his generation. But because he did not collect his writings and publish them as a book, much of the importance of his thinking was relegated to the archives, remaining fragmented for a century and a half, his impact only partially understood. Professor John Stauffer’s edition of his collected works in this series, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press, has helped quite dramatically to restore McCune Smith to his rightful place as a major figure in the African American canon.
(Coincidentally, at the launch of this volume at the New-York Historical Society, several of McCune Smith’s descendants, responding to invitations from Stauffer, attended and confessed that they had no idea that their distinguished ancestor was an African American, since his children had decided to pass, certainly an unintended benefit of the series!)
In addition to James McCune Smith, I was motivated to propose this series of collected essays to Oxford because of my high regard for Alain Locke, the first professionally trained African American academic philosopher. I first encountered Locke’s work on aesthetics and criticism as an undergraduate at Yale in the 1969–1970 academic year, the very year that “Afro-American Studies,” as we called it then, was being introduced as a major on so many college campuses. The Harlem Renaissance was one of our two compelling African American topics du jour, as it were (along with black agency in slavery), and to study the Harlem Renaissance, one soon learned, was to encounter the aesthetic theories and the cultural criticism of Alain Locke.
For several reasons Locke was an inspiration to us, the first generation of students of color to benefit from affirmative action policies that allowed us to compete in large numbers with white students (historically, white universities had imposed and maintained strict racial quotas on the number of black students matriculating). First of all, he was not only a scholar, but a professional philosopher at that, educated at Harvard (graduating one year before T. S. Eliot) and at the University of Oxford as our country’s first black Rhodes Scholar, where he rubbed shoulders with fellow Rhodes Scholars Horace M. Kallen, one of the pivotal figures in cultural pluralism, and Pa Ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders of the African National Congress of South Africa. And he had chosen to study philosophy for his Ph.D. after Du Bois, just a decade or so before him at Harvard, had decided that no Negro could make a career as a professional philosopher. (Both Du Bois and Locke, by the way, had went on after Harvard College to study at what is now the University of Berlin.) For those of us who entertained the notion of becoming a scholar, or at least following our undergraduate education with postgraduate study in Europe, Locke, like Du Bois, was an inspiration: “the most exquisitely educated African American of his generation,” as Charles Molesworth puts it in his compelling introduction to this volume.
But Locke was an inspiration for another important reason: he was the veritable “dean” of the fabled Harlem Renaissance, the cultural movement that many of us presumed to be the doppelganger of our own cultural movement, the Black Arts movement. Our ability to enroll at schools such as Harvard or Yale, we realized, was in some way an extension of that movement, and both were legatees of the Renaissance in Harlem in the nineteen twenties. We studied the Harlem Renaissance, and Locke’s involvement and what he wrote about it, as both model and cautionary tale about the role of our iteration of Du Bois’s educated class of African Americans, the “talented tenth,” as he famously put it. Locke’s example came to be a part of our very own cultural moment, the “revolution” that we so self-consciously wish to affect.
Locke’s ideas about cultural nationalism, cultural pluralism and hybridity, his insistence that “race” was always socially constructed, his writings about African and African American art, about the image of black subjects in American and European art and literature, his prescient understanding of the nature and function of improvisation in African American music, and his theories and practical criticism of African American literature, his valorization of folk traditions—with the caveat that these should be “universalized,” as Leonard Harris puts it—his complex relation to white patronage, his belief that literature and the arts were another form of the civil rights movement, the arc of his career as a teacher, writer, editor, and critic, and his homosexuality—all of these aspects of his work and life made him an endlessly fascinating source for us in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, as the Black Arts movement faded and the Black Studies movement became institutionalized throughout the American academy. But without a collection of Locke’s prolific, yet scattered, writings, a full assessment of his role as a philosopher and a critic was quite difficult to achieve.
Drawing upon efforts to collect Locke’s work by scholars such as Jeffrey Stewart (1983) and Leonard Harris (1989), and critical assessments by scholars such as Cornel West, Johnny Washington, and Leonard Harris, Charles Molesworth (who, with Harris, has co-authored the definitive biography of Locke) has here assembled the definitive collection of Alain Locke’s work that we’ve been waiting for. It covers the breadth of subjects that concerned Locke, including literature, art, drama, music, aesthetics, race, value and culture, and democracy—topics to which he returned again and again, to extend and amplify his thinking over almost half a century of reflection. With this collection, Locke’s proper place in the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and pragmatism, can more readily and fully be assessed, as can his role in the history of African American cultural criticism. Charles Molesworth’s superb introductory essay sets the stage, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the importance of Alain Locke to the history of American letters.