Article excerpt:

The title of Stewart’s biography is a tribute to Alain Locke’s seminal work, The New Negro: An Interpretation. This 1925 anthology highlighted the works of several up-and-coming black writers of the 20th century, planting these authors and, thus, a new black intellectual movement squarely in the public eye. While Alain Locke and John Dewey did not work directly together, Dewey’s philosophical approaches, specifically aesthetic valuation, significantly influenced Locke’s life. John C. Stewart provides a dense and thorough illustration of Locke’s use of aesthetic valuation in his personal, professional, and educational experiences. Locke was pursuing his doctoral degree at Harvard University in Dewey’s discipline at a time when Dewey was effectively moving philosophy toward pragmatism and a philosophical approach that tested concepts against practice. Stewart highlights how a professor-student partnership between Dewey and Locke, if both were at Harvard during the height of the Golden Age of philosophy, would have resulted in countless benefits for Locke’s postgraduate aspirations: “Dewey would have offered Locke the opportunity to work with a social philosopher of the first rank and share in Dewey’s success as a public social philosopher” (279). Throughout Locke’s life, he embodied Dewey’s aesthetic valuation in his assessments of observations and experiences related to the humanities in the United States and other countries. Locke’s focus on being open to alternative understandings of his experiences of the arts through aesthetic appreciation allowed him to continue creating a vision of what the black renaissance could be in the United States. This strategy also resulted in internal conflict and disagreement with other black scholars and activists.