The Negro Artist And The Racial Mountain Analysis

The younger generation of Negro writers during the New Negro Arts Movement created a space in which Their Eyes Were Watching God could exist within. Alain Locke (1885-1954) and Langston Hughes both advocated for the inclusion of art that was not solely political, or at least not solely adhering to the positive, respectability aspects of political theory. Locke, himself, found his voice to be in inherent opposition to the stringent views of Du Bois and went on to transcend the restraints of intergenerational disputes over the purpose and construct of the movement to affirm that “the ‘Negro Renaissance’ was a long-term, trans-generational, and interracial cultural shift, while the term ‘New Negro’ represented the youngest generation of specifically black artists at any particular time” (Mitchell 650). …show more content…
Hughes’s piece “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) which rejects artistic, systematic, and societal conventions and promotes the beauty of blackness and the importance of existing as an artist within the scope of being black, was published not only as a response to George Schuyler’s dismissal of the need for black art and the existence of the need to express vastly different human experiences through art because of one’s race, but to Du Bois’ slightly oppressive standards of art. Hughes was upset by the lack of advocacy for the “New Negroes,” the next generation, the youth, and in “The New Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” he substantiates his beliefs with poetic, manifesto-like writing that is intended to empower and inspire the young Negro