Alain Locke and the Visual Arts

“Reflecting on works by Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, and others, Mercer demonstrates that mourning was central to Harlem Renaissance Africanism. . . . In a striking interpretation of Jones’s celebrated painting Les Fétiches (1938), which depicts an ensemble of African statuary swirling in a charged darkness, he writes that the work embodies not a straightforward reclamation of roots but the tragedy and the promise of diaspora.”—Julian Lucas, New Yorker

“Mercer’s sumptuously illustrated study . . . succeeds in positioning Locke as an important philosophical voice in the ‘not yet finalized story of Afro-modern art and culture.’”—Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement

“An enthralling saga of ideas. . . . An indispensable addition to the proliferating scholarship on Locke and, by extension, to American thought in the twentieth century.”—Paul Devlin, New Criterion

“A deep critical dive into Alain Locke’s significant contributions to African American and Black diasporic visual culture.”—James Smalls, caa.reviews

Shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize

2024 recipient of CAA's Frank Jewitt Mather Award for Criticism

2023 Josephine Miles Award Winner, sponsored by PEN Oakland

“In this brilliantly argued book, Kobena Mercer convinces us that it was the visual art of Africa and the New Negro Renaissance that fashioned the queer international modernity we love today.”—Jeffrey C. Stewart, author of The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and editor of The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings by Alain Locke

“Kobena Mercer’s highly original work virtually defines the field of Locke’s views concerning the visual arts and will be indispensable to Locke studies in the future.”—Charles Molesworth, Queens College, CUNY

“A meticulous, complex, and poignant account of the profound entanglements that condition Modernist aesthetics as we know it today. Through the key figure of Alain Locke, Mercer traces how African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance confronted, negotiated, trafficked, reimagined, and ultimately re-valued the objects of their ‘ancestral origins.’”—Anne Anlin Cheng, author of Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface

“This masterful and indispensable reassessment upends Locke’s persistent caricature as a dogmatic ancestralist and synthesizes the complexities of his sprawling oeuvre and his sexuality into a fresh, compelling account of his Afromodern aesthetic philosophy.”—John Ott, James Madison University