Abstract
This essay explores the ways through which Alain Locke's anthology of African American art and criticism, The New Negro: An Interpretation, constituted an African American ethos during the Harlem Renaissance. Loche enacted a hermeneutical rhetoric that reinterpreted black folk tradition, African artistry, and modem pragmatism as topoi for rhetorical practice, and his discursive strategies appropriated and modified divergent cultural traditions to invent a “New Negro. “Locke's hermeneutical rhetoric exhibits an aesthetic praxis that is sensitive to the ways in which the emotions habituate rhetorical and cultural practices, which inform the achievement of propriety.