Eric King Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012)
Hearing the Hurt is an examination of how the New Negro
movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, provoked and sustained
public discourse and deliberation about black culture and identity in
the early twentieth century.
Borrowing its title from a W. E. B. Du Bois essay, Hearing the Hurt explores
the nature of rhetorical invention, performance, and mutation by
focusing on the multifaceted issues brought forth in the New Negro
movement, which Watts treats as a rhetorical struggle over what it means
to be properly black and at the same time properly American. Who
determines the meaning of blackness? How should African Americans fit
in with American public culture? In what way should black communities
and families be structured? The New Negro movement animated dynamic
tension among diverse characterizations of African American civil
rights, intellectual life, and well-being, and thus it provides a
fascinating and complex stage on which to study how ideologies clash
with each other to become accepted universally.
Watts,
conceptualizing the artistic culture of the time as directly affected
by the New Negro public discourse, maps this rhetorical struggle onto
the realm of aesthetics and discusses some key incarnations of New Negro
rhetoric in select speeches, essays, and novels.
Noting that Watts' book has "great strengths," the review in
Research & Reference Book News highlights how Watts "quietly notes that American ideas of color, race, sexuality, and
power are deeply connected, and we can't talk productively about the New
Negro movement until we accept that many of its artists and thinkers
were both black and gay/lesbian/bisexual. It is okay to say so, and it
is both possible and necessary to
talk about those things together. He [Watts] gives us one good model of what it
looks like to do that." Calling
Hearing the Hurt a "fine achievement in a scholarly landscape focused on fiercely-defended
single-issue categories," this review concludes that the books is "a valuable one for
scholars and students of African-American culture, 20th century art,
rhetoric, or identity studies from any perspective." Robert Terrill, the author of
Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment, notes that Watts's book "attends to a significant historical movement
that is woefully understudied among rhetorical critics." Watts's "intensity is palpable," Terrill continues, and "his textual analyses are insightful, and
his sometimes lyrical turns of phrase both enliven his arguments and
invite the reader to share his commitment to the material.”
Eric King Watts is an associate professor in the
Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina. Watts has also taught at the University of Dayton and Wake Forest University. A former editor of
Critical Studies in Media Communication, Watts received the New Investigator Award from the NCA Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division in 2002, and the 2002 Outstanding Journal Article Award and the 2004 Outstanding Book Chapter Award from the African American Communication & Culture Division of NCA.
Book Link:
University of Alabama Press site.