The Significance of the New Negro Movement: Moving Away from the Master Narrative

The mid-life crisis, the search for self, and adolescence all describe times in a person's life when they have reached a milestone, and now they decide the next path to take. They search for a voice, they feel their way through the proverbial darkness trying to find the next level of life that they will work through. If this point of stirring is reached by individuals, then it only makes sense that it would be reached by groups of individuals who share a certain status in life. It is when a group of individuals bonded together by their status as something or another in this world feel this stirring that there arises the potential for a movement. They desire change, and even begin to ask themselves how to move away from what they have been up until this point and what they will become after this point. They may not all arrive at the same conclusion, and their reasons for asking these questions may be different, but one thing remains the same, the desire. One reason the New Negro Movement serves as a significant time for the African American community is because it was a time when the community began the process of breaking away from the master narrative of slavery and began to ask itself, "Now what?". This movement can be seen in the works of many of the authors who were part of the New Negro Movement such as Walter White, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and Jessie Fauset.