Taking the Blues Away: The Second Edition of The New Negro

Abstract

Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation–universally regarded as the key text for what later became known as the Harlem Renaissance–is usually reported as having been published in 1925 and reprinted in 1927. I argue that the 1927 version should in fact be regarded as a second edition, given the significant excision of the two Miguel Covarrubias drawings that had appeared in the original edition as “Jazz.” One of those drawings, given the title “Blues Dancing,” is analyzed closely via its two other appearances, one in W. C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology (1926), the other in Vanity Fair, illustrating a story by Covarrubias’s friend, the Caribbean writer Eric Walrond. Attention is paid to the setting of the story, the Sugar Cane Club, often viewed as the epitome of jazz cabarets in Harlem. I then address Locke’s decision to omit the Covarrubias drawings from the second edition of The New Negro through consideration of the events of 1926, arguably the pinnacle of the Harlem Renaissance but a year that saw intense debates about the propriety of representations of jazz in Black writing.