The New Negro
The Life of Alain Locke
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Narrated by:
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Bill Andrew Quinn
About this listen
In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally.
He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his White patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man.
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
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By: Benjamin Moser
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C. S. Lewis - A Life
- Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
- By: Alister E. McGrath
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has captured the imaginations of millions. In C. S. Lewis - A Life, Dr. Alister McGrath recounts the unlikely path of this Oxford don, who spent his days teaching English literature to the brightest students in the world and his spare time writing.
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Awakening my curiosity and desire to read more!
- By Pearl Glacier on 03-13-13
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The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
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Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
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The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
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Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
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Jane Crow
- The Life of Pauli Murray
- By: Rosalind Rosenberg
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 18 hrs and 30 mins
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A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.
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What a legacy!!!
- By Paul on 03-08-21
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Parfit
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Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.
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Loved it
- By Anna Karenina on 07-05-23
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A Bound Man
- Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
- By: Shelby Steele
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
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From the New York Times best-selling and controversial author Shelby Steele comes an illuminating examination of the complex racial issues that confront presidential candidate Barack Obama in his race for the White House, a quest that will be one of those galvanizing occasions that forces a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America.
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The Masks We Wear
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Marx's General
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- By: Tristram Hunt
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
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Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the 19th century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman.
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Not many choices here anyways.
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 02-16-13
By: Tristram Hunt
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Ghetto
- The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
- By: Mitchell Duneier
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
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On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto - a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the 16th century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the history of the ghetto in Europe, as well as later efforts to understand the problems of the American city.
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Impressive
- By Jean on 12-10-16
By: Mitchell Duneier
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The Trouble with White Women
- A Counterhistory of Feminism
- By: Kyla Schuller, Brittney Cooper - foreword
- Narrated by: Christine Lakin, Mela Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
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Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their White feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves. In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the 200-year counter-history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against White feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice.
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Reframes the past by today’s standards
- By Dianne on 02-21-23
By: Kyla Schuller, and others
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What listeners say about The New Negro
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Frank Donnelly
- 05-26-23
An Excellent Biography About An African American Intellectual Of The Past
I feel found this to be a very good biography. It is very lengthy with numerous relevant digressions, As a student of African American History, I found a treasure trove of material for further study. Some of the philosophical concepts are complicated. I was very glad to have the accompanying kindle copy to read. This requires a commitment but for me it was well worth it. Thank You….
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-14-20
I love long biographies of difficult people
I learned a bit about Alain Locke in grad school, when studying the history of Africans and African Americans in Europe after World War I. His name popped up in most of my sources and although I was curious about him, his work wasn't central to my research. This biography is answering all of my questions about him. It's not an easy listen, though, and people who don't have a decent knowledge of African American intellectual history and the Harlem Renaissance might find it overwhelming. For me, though, it's an embarrassment of riches. I am learning about his connections with people that I had no idea he knew, like Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Mason. At the same time, Locke does not emerge as particularly likeable, but given the things that he has to struggle with -- not the least of which were chronically bad health and living as a gay black man -- his tendency to be manipulative, intellectually dishonest (at times) and defensive, bordering on paranoid, makes sense. I have to admit that it took me about three months of off and on reading and a few restarts to complete this tome, because of the length and its density, but I enjoy biographies like this that get into the messiness of a life. The last chapter, that discusses Locke's death and Locke's legacy, soars.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jean
- 08-04-19
Masterful Biography
This is a very long book. It won the 2018 National Book Award for Non-fiction. This is the biography of Alain Locke (1885-1954), the father of the Harlem Renaissance. He was the mentor to many black artists.
The book is well written and meticulously researched. Stewart also interviewed many people that knew Locke. Locke was the first African American Rhodes Scholar. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His main idea was that African-American communities could be crucibles of creativity. This is an excellent biography even if it bogged down at times. I had not read any of Jeffrey C. Stewart’s books or had I heard of Alain Locke before reading this book. So, I learned a lot from reading this book.
The book was 45 hours and thirty-four minutes. (That would be 944 pages in printed format). Bill Andrew Quinn did a good job narrating the book. Quinn is a voice-over artist, audiobook narrator and host of his own radio show.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Paul Fletcher
- 04-11-21
Real Leadership
Alain Locke is a unique biography about real human leadership with all its complexity and contradiction; love , envy and passion.
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- Porter
- 01-21-20
Let me guess? Locke was a gay black man?
The 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning book about the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance".
You would think that this book would easily rate 4 or 5 stars.
So why am I giving it a weak 3 star rating? Because I felt that the author missed a golden opportunity.
The Harlem Renaissance (AKA the New Negro Movement) is a period of American history that most American's do not know existed. Those who are familiar with it, are probably mostly familiar with it because of the impact it had on music (the birth of Jazz) and fashion. Other aspects (literature, drama, and philosophy) take a back seat.
Jeffrey Stewart chose to focus on Alain Locke.
Don't get me wrong, it is a biography on Alain Locke, so the subject is rightly Locke.
Unfortunately, nearly a 1,000 pages long and the book did not really provide a hook as to why we should care about Locke. Yes, at the end he discussed how Locke's New Negro impacted modern America, but thoughout the book I was more likely to think, "I can understand why Locke is less known than Booker T Washington or W.E.B Du Bois" than to think that he was a pivotal voice in black history/culture.
The book focused too much on Locke's sexual tensions/frustrations than upon his impact. When I finished this book I started listening to Robert Caro's Power Broker. The Power Broker, like the New Negro, is a huge book about a person I was not familiar with. Caro instantly connects with the listener and explains why the person is relevant. He also provides sufficient background and information about tangental characters/issues. The New Nego does neither.
The sections where Stewart discussed his philosophy/ideas were fascinating. Unfortunately, they were lost in Locke's pursuit of sex.
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6 people found this helpful
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- rfgll
- 07-07-19
Excellent
Tour de Force
Must Read
Amazing,
In depth research on Locke
Highly Recommend this book
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- Ebony
- 06-05-20
A big book
The book is 45 chapters. It's a big book but worth the read. No regrets.
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- Quincy Jenkins
- 04-02-23
Outstanding!
I learned so much about Dr. Locke, an American literary giant and one of our greatest thinkers. Great book.
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- Lynn Lambkins
- 07-18-19
Disappointing
I'd like a refund or trade for another audiobook. This one was sorely disappointing to me.
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