We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Harlem, the 'New Negro,' and the cultural roots of Azikiwe's nationalist politics.
- Authors
Nwakanma, Obi
- Abstract
'Harlem, the New Negro, and the cultural roots of Nnamdi Azikiwe's Nationalism' The anti-colonial nationalist movement was staged at two levels: the first was at the level of political nationalism and the second is at the level of cultural nationalism. Decolonization required the re-awakening of consciousness and an affirmation of a precolonial past by its invocation through music, folklore, poetry, and the performative process. Colonialism had circulated European myths and ideas through the colonial schools, the churches, and by law. Colonized Africans were thus subjected to a process of acculturation which bound them to Europe. It required a strategy of cultural retrieval to 'decolonize the mind' of Africans under the stress of colonial representations. Nnamdi Azikiwe was catalytic to this process of decolonization through his journalism, and in his own engagement as a poet considered among the pioneer West African poets writing in the English language in the 20th century. Although not much work has been done in this area, but Nnamdi Azikiwe's creative life yields an important insight, and provides a way of looking at the evolution of modern African literary and artistic culture and its links to the Harlem Renaissance. Through his newspapers, first as the Editor of the Accra Morning Post, and later as Editor and publisher of the West African Pilot in Lagos, Azikiwe was the first to bring the poets and writers of the Harlem Renaissance to a West African audience. Azikiwe's own work-both in terms of his cultural politics, and his own aesthetic practice as a poet is rooted within the context, and the ideas of the 'New Negro' aesthetics of the Harlem renaissance. This essay argues for an interpretation of Nnamdi Azikiwe's cultural and political consciousness as framed within this experience of the 'New Negro' and in the context of a black Atlantic formation that extends from his growing up in what MJC Echeruo has described as 'New Negro' cities, to his education in the United States under the inspiration, and influence of the key figures of the Harlem renaissance, a fact which I argue becomes evident both in his poetry, and in his deployment of the cultural politics of Harlem in his own anti-colonial nationalist work.
- Subjects
ATLANTIC Ocean Region; AZIKIWE, Nnamdi, 1904-1996; HARLEM Renaissance; WESTERN influences on African civilization; WEST African civilization; AFRICAN-African American relations; ATLANTIC studies; HISTORY
- Publication
History Compass, 2017, Vol 15, Issue 8, pn/a
- ISSN
1478-0542
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/hic3.12402