ABSTRACT
George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995) was the first major study to offer a sustained analysis of the impact of Boasian anthropology upon Harlem Renaissance techniques of cultural description. Since then, a number of commentators have elaborated upon his assessment that Boas ‘bequeathed a dual, even contradictory, legacy to the 1920s’ (Hutchinson 1995, 76). Vernon J. Williams pays detailed attention to what he terms ‘the ‘Boasian paradox’ – the contradiction between his philosophical egalitarian sentiments and his recontextualization of traditional European and American physical anthropology’ (1996, 6). More recently, Barbara Foley has addressed the conceptual limitations of Boas’s thinking on race, contending that his tendency to analyse racism in emotional or psychological terms fails to account for ‘the material foundations of racism’ (Foley 2003, 153). She finds comparable limitations in key Harlem Renaissance texts, not least Alain Locke’s landmark anthology, The New Negro. Michael A. Elliott suggests an alternative point of entry to the issue, arguing that Boas’s work ‘crystallizes the possibilities and the dilemmas of the documentation of culture’ (2002, 3). Although Boas consistently challenged the racist logic of social Darwinism, his culture concept ‘suffered from a crucial limitation, the inability to account for cultural change’ (Elliott 2002, xxvi).
