inventing The new negro

It’s no coincidence 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, Daphne 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.