The art of the aesthete: Aesthetics, subjectivity, and ethics in the ‘New Negro’ writings of Alain Locke, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, and Nella Larsen

“The Art of the Aesthete” maintains that the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance has been haunted by the discourse of its failure, stemming in large part from its commitment to the Western history of ideas about aesthetics, which proffers the distinctive and redemptive capability of art and aesthetic interest. As it acknowledges and reengages the New Negro Renaissance\u27s investment in Western aesthetics, this dissertation provides a rhetorical and theoretical analysis of the way both art and the aesthetical interest undergirding it might be promoted as vehicles through which to reconfigure the parameters of subjectivity and ethics. Evocative of Immanuel Kant\u27s notion of aesthetic judgment, key texts by Alain Locke, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, and Nella Larsen privilege aesthetic consciousness as a novel mode of perception that inspires the imagination of alternative models of black being—those that might evade untenable or narrow conceptions of blackness. Re-conceptualizing the New Negro movement in terms of the aesthete foregrounds the interpretative ethos of artistry and illuminates the important role played by aestheticism in informing a noteworthy instance of African-American modernity