“Thinking more collectively”: The New Negro e l’archivio della Harlem Renaissance

This article’s focal point is the year 1925 as a fundamental date for the creation and institutionalization of Black culture, within the period known as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Two fundamental and interconnected entities were created in 1925: the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, and the library center called “The Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints” at the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, based on the collection owned by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. It also explores how these institutions, in different but somewhat complementary ways, worked to foster a sense of intergenerational, transnational, and interclass Black collectivity and community, a sense that is not always recognized or valued in studies that tend to keep these fields separate. The last section of the article takes into consideration Zora Neale Hurston’s short story titled “Spunk,” published in The New Negro, as a crossroad of Black language, imaginary and self- representation of Black lives, representative of the experiment that the anthology carried out.