Research Catalog

Title

Inventing the new Negro : narrative, culture, and ethnography / Daphne Lamothe.

Author

Lamothe, Daphne Mary.

Publication

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2008], ©2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

232 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which key figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown adapted ethnography and folklore in their narratives to create a cohesive, collective, and modern black identity." "Lamothe explores how these figures assumed the roles of self-reflective translators and explicators of African American and African diasporic cultures to Western, largely white audiences."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Ethnology > United States
• Blacks
• Anthropology in literature
• Harlem Renaissance
• African American intellectuals
• African Americans in literature
• American literature > African American authors
• African American anthropologists

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-217) and index.

Contents

1. Ethnography and the New Negro Imagination -- 2. Men of Science in the Post-Slavery Era -- 3. Raising the Veil: Racial Divides and Ethnographic Crossings in The Souls of Black Folk -- 4. Striking Out into the Interior: Travel, Imperialism, and Ethnographic Perspectives in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man -- 5. Living Culture in Sterling Brown's Southern Road -- 6. Woman Dancing Culture: Katherine Dunham's Dance/Anthropology -- 7. Narrative Dissonance: Conflict and Contradiction in Hurston's Caribbean Ethnography -- 8. Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Vodou Intertext -- 9. Afterword.

ISBN

• 9780812240931 (alk. paper)
• 0812240936 (alk. paper)

LCCN

• 2008007777
• 40015637470

OCLC

• ocn212432492
• 212432492
• SCSB-5417660

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries