A new African American Negro

In her discussion of the similarities between the Irish and the Harlem Renaissances, Tracy Mishkin (1998:69ff.) lists three ingredients that were central in the construction of an Irish identity. To counter the degrading racial and ethnic stereotyping perpetrated by the English, Irish intellectuals called upon the past, the peasants, and religion. A similar list could be made for those intellectuals and artists who composed the two interrelated currents of the New Negro movement that emerged out of the cultural trauma spurred by the end of Reconstruction and culminated in the urban Renaissance of the 1920s, on the energy provided by a new generation. Out of this movement emerged the idea of the African American, which reinterpreted the meaning of slavery as it renegotiated the borders of the collective and its memory. In the case of African Americans, the list would include much the same elements, the past, the peasants, and religion but with a slightly different spin.