"The Most Enthusiastic Antiquarian": Enslaved Testimony and New Negro Recovery

The New Negro Movement is conventionally considered the first African American cultural expression of modernity. Spanning the final years of the nineteenth century and reaching its apex during the Harlem Renaissance of the... [ view full abstract ]

The New Negro Movement is conventionally considered the first African American cultural expression of modernity. Spanning the final years of the nineteenth century and reaching its apex during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, the central political and aesthetic project of the New Negro was defined by both self-renewal and self-negation: The utopian trope of the “New Negro” was an ahistorical fiction of self-making that directly opposed, and sought to eradicate, the image of the “Old Negro” derived from stereotypes associated with plantation slavery. While recent work has aimed to reevaluate the relationship between the “Old” and “New” Negro—emphasizing historical continuity rather than rupture in the development of African American aesthetic and political practices during the period—little of this work has addressed how New Negro Modernism sought to recover the voices and cultures of the last generation of American ex-slaves.

My paper remedies this gap by demonstrating how New Negro modernism developed alongside a concomitant interest in slave culture, considering the almost counterintuitive ways in which the New Negro Movement made use of enslaved testimony. It focuses on Zora Neale Hurston’s unpublished manuscript Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo (1931), a biography of Cudjo Kazoola [Kossula] Lewis—survivor of the last slaving vessel to import African slaves illegally to the United States in 1859—compiled from several interviews. The paper first suggests that re-centering enslaved testimony in the development of New Negro Modernism forces us to reconsider standard periodizations of African American literature. Not simply a nineteenth-century phenomenon recovered by later writers and intellectuals during the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, enslaved testimony rather remains central to Black cultural production well after the Civil War and well before the advent of “neo-slavery” in the later twentieth century.

More broadly, I further argue that works like Barracoon trouble conventional notions of the “slave narrative” genre. Whereas Americanist criticism presumes that such texts provided historical accounts of enslavement in support of an abolitionist cause, Hurston’s work with Lewis—alongside similar contemporaneous work carried out by Booker T. Washington, Arthur Huff Fauset, and Ophelia Settle Egypt—rather reveals that such projects sought primarily to recover Africanist folklore and cultural practices, thereby providing a diasporic foundation for the development of the New Negro Movement.