Antoni Górny University of Warsaw Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011) The history of African American culture—much like the history of almost any culture developed in, or under the inluence of, the West—is dominated by the igures of dead men, who loom over all historical studies with a mat- ter-of-factness that has long remained disconcertingly appropriate. Two strategies are typically employed to interrogate this masculine bias. One consists in the exploration of the under-recorded and often unwritten his- tory of the role women played in the formation of a given culture or move- ment. Such archaeological works often deliberately set out to tackle the bias by highlighting the ways in which history “forgot” about the women— as was the case with Rosa Parks, for years remembered almost exclusively as the lady who refused to give up her seat. The other strategy turns the spotlight on the masculine heroes themselves, questioning the rules of the game instead of trying to play it. This is the course Anna Pochmara follows in her study of the origins and development of the idea of the “New Negro.” Her analysis focuses on how several illustrious Black men of letters involved in the Harlem Renaissance—Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright—dealt with the question of Black manhood in the racist America of the early twen- tieth century. With this purpose in mind, Pochmara invokes two well-es- tablished theoretical paradigms: Harold Bloom’s anxiety of inluence, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s anxiety of authorship. In the context of a “manly” struggle for supremacy in Black American culture, [t]he black male writer is caught in a double bind between the need to en- gage in “heroic warfare” with his strong predecessors and the need to es- tablish a legitimate patrilineal lineage, which will both validate black male authorship and set off the specters of social illegitimacy resulting from white men’s symbolic and biological fathering of black children. (9–10) Unauthenticated Download Date | 1/4/17 4:55 PM