JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. he early decades of the twentieth century were, in many respects, the beginning of the period of black aesthetic and intellectual reconstruction. Alain Locke identifies the era as "a sudden flood-tide of new life and vitality" in African American music, dance, and musical comedy (57). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., maintains that during this time there emerged "the era of the myth of a New Negro, a New Negro in search of a Renaissance suitable to contain this culturally willed myth."l The notions of new life, vitality, and the "New Negro" in African American culture are central to this essay, not least because they underscore efforts by African Americans during the first decades of this century to deconstruct the minstrel caricature and to reconstruct the image of cultural representation. To counter the nineteenth century's negative representation of African Americans, the notion of a New Negro in art, literature, and theatre surfaced, suggesting "a bold and audacious act of language, signifying the will to power, to dare to recreate a race by renaming it, despite the dubiousness of the venture" (Gates, "Trope" 132).The central and driving force underlying this will to reconstruct the race lay in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. It was Du Bois, according to August Meier, who was most aware "of the complexity and sophistication of African culture" (264).2 Drama critic Lester Walton recognized the significance of The Souls of Black Folk in his weekly column "Music and the Stage." Du Bois makes the powerful plea, Walton wrote in 1908, "that the history of art in this nation will not be written until the Negro has made his contribution" (6).3 The Souls of Black Folk can be shown to be
