Worlds of Color, World of Shadows: On the New Negro Movement of the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract In his 1925 essay, “Worlds of Color,” W.E.B. DuBois mapped a global terrain of blackness shaped by coloniality. In the colonial shadows, black West Indian intellectuals understood the New Negro movement in the US as part of a broader transnational black consciousness. Their anticolonial framework would go on to organize political understandings of black identity in the Bandung era, when decolonizing blackness across multiple African, Caribbean, European, and American locations became a rallying cry. However, over the ensuing years, the transformative impact of the variety of black social and cultural movements of the twentieth century has been mixed. How were the seeds of today’s black social and intellectual movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Afro-pessimism with their sharp focus on antiblackness and models of justice centered on repairing the human, planted in the heyday of the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance? Are they the signs of the unfinished legacies of the Race/Color line that W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated in the early twentieth century?