Alain Locke and the Visual Arts

“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