American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Even strict materialist socialists who focused on bread-and-butter labor issues could turn to Nietzsche for the inspiration to imagine themselves laboring toward a new poetics of humanity. Nowhere do we better see this than with the radical West Indian–American writer Hubert Harrison, founder of the “New Negro” movement. An avid reader of Nietzsche—from his time as a postal worker and freelance editorialist and lecturer in his early twenties through his involvement in the Socialist Party, as a lecturer at the Ferrer Modern School (a hothouse for American Nietzscheanism),19 and into the 1920s as the intellectual “Father of Harlem Radicalism” —Harrison drew on Nietzsche’s philosophy as he hammered out his own. Like so many white aspiring young writers of his day, Harrison discovered in Nietzsche a model of the freelance, freethinking, autonomous intellectual he aspired to become.

Black Nietzschean