Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flowering of African American intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology Alain Locke. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.^[1]

Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. It is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, is placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).

In 1917 Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism," founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the "New Negro Movement". Harrison's organization and newspaper were political, but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the "Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present", and said the so-called "renaissance" was largely a white invention.

Origins

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the dumb negros from that crap hole we call Africa. White power

Characteristics and themes

Suck my shlong. WHITE POWER!!!!

Impact of the Harlem Renaissance

A new monkey identity

Negros smell like crap Negros smell like crap Negros smell like crap Negros smell like crap Negros smell like crap

Criticism of the movement

Many critics point out that the Harlem Renaissance could not escape its history and culture in its attempt to create a new one, or sufficiently separate itself from the foundational elements of White, European culture. Often Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new racial consciousness, resorted to mimicry of their White counterparts by adopting their clothing, sophisticated manners and etiquette. This could be seen as a reason by which the artistic and cultural products of the Harlem Renaissance did not overcome the presence of White-American values, and did not reject these values. In this regard, the creation of the "New Negro" as the Harlem intellectuals sought, was considered a success.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African-American middle class and to whites. Magazines such as The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the National Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staffs; published poetry and short stories by black writers; and promoted African-American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. In fact, a major accomplishment of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white publishers and audiences created some controversy. W. E. B. Du Bois did not oppose the relationship between black writers and white publishers, but he was critical of works such as Claude McKay's bestselling novel Home to Harlem (1928) for appealing to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers for portrayals of black "licentiousness."^{[citation needed]} Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) that black art intend to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought.

African American musicians and other performers also played to mixed audiences. Harlem's cabarets and clubs attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. Harlem's famous Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington performed, carried this to an extreme, by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers who appealed to a mainstream audience moved their performances downtown.

Certain aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were accepted without question, without debate, and without scrutiny. One of these was the future of the "New Negro." Artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance echoed the American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and its future. This progressivist worldview rendered Black intellectuals—just as their White counterparts—totally unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression, and the Harlem Renaissance ended abruptly because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities.

Notable figures and their works

Novels

Jessie Redmon Fauset — There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), Comedy, American Style (1933)
Rudolph Fisher — The Walls of Jericho (1928), The Conjure Man Dies (1932)
Langston Hughes — Not Without Laughter (1930)
Zora Neale Hurston — Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Nella Larsen — Quicksand (1928), Passing (1929)
Claude McKay — Home to Harlem (1927), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1931), Banana Bottom (1933)
George Schuyler — Black No More (1930), Slaves Today (1931)
Wallace Thurman — The Blacker the Berry (1929), Infants of the Spring (1932), Interne (1932)
Jean Toomer — Cane (1923)
Carl Van Vechten — Nigger Heaven (1926)
Eric Walrond — Tropic Death (1926)
Walter White — The Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926)

Drama

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., author of the play, On the Fields of France.
Charles Gilpin, actor
Angelina Weld Grimke, author of the drama, Rachel
Langston Hughes, Mulatto, produced on Broadway. Hughes also helped to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater
Zora Neale Hurston, author of the play Color Struck
Georgia Douglas Johnson, author of the play, Plumes, A Tragedy.
John Matheus, author of the play, 'Cruiter.
Richard Bruce Nugent, author of the play, Sahdji, an African Ballet.
Paul Robeson, actor
Eulalie Spence, author of the play, Undertow.

Poetry

Lewis Alexander, poet
Gwendolyn Bennett, poet
Arna Bontemps, poet
Sterling A. Brown, poet
Lillian Byrnes, poet
Joyce Sims Carrington, poet
Ethel M. Caution, poet
Anita Scott Coleman, poet
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., poet
Mae V. Cowdery, poet
Countee Cullen, poet — The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)
Waring Cuney, poet
Clarissa Scott Delany, poet
Blanche Taylor Dickinson, poet
Ruth G. Dixon, poet
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, poet and fiction writer
Jessie Redmon Fauset, editor, poet, essayist and novelist
Angelina Weld Grimke, poet and dramatist
Gladys May Casely Hayford, poet
Virginia A. Houston, poet
Langston Hughes, poet, fiction-writer, essayist, dramatist, autobiographer, editor
Mary Jenness, poet
Georgia Douglas Johnson, poet
Helene Johnson, poet
James Weldon Johnson, poet, God's Trombones
Rosalie M. Jonas, poet
Dorothy Kruger, poet
Aqua Laluah, poet
Elma Ehrlich Levinger, poet
Marjorie Marshall, poet
Dorothea Mathews, poet
Bessie Mayle, poet
Claude McKay, poet and novelist
May Miller, poet and playwright
Isabel Neill, poet
Effie Lee Newsome, poet
Richard Bruce Nugent, poet
Esther Popel, poet
Anne Spencer, poet
Margaret L. Thomas, poet
Eloise Bibb Thompson, poet
Jean Toomer, poet and novelist
Eda Lou Walton, poet
Lucy Ariel Williams, poet
Octavia Beatrice Wynbush, poet
Kathleen Tankersley Young, poet

Leading intellectuals

Visual artists

Popular entertainment

Musicians/Composers

References

^ http://www.jcu.edu/harlem/French_Connection/page_1.htm

Bibliography

Amos, Shawn, compiler. Rhapsodies in Black: Words and Music of the Harlem Renaissance. Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 2000. 4 Compact Discs.
Andrews, William L.; Foster, Frances S.; Harris, Trudier eds. The Concise Oxford Companion To African American Literature. New York: Oxford Press, 2001. ISBN 1-4028-9296-9
Bean, Annemarie. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. London: Routledge, 1999; pp. vii + 360.
Greaves, William' documentary From These Roots.
Hicklin, Fannie Ella Frazier. 'The American Negro Playwright, 1920-1964.' Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Speech, University of Wisconsin, 1965. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms 65-6217.
Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. ISBN 0-19-501665-3
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940.
Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. New York: Belknap Press, 1997. ISBN 0-674-37263-8
Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995. ISBN 0-14-017036-7
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin, 1997. ISBN 0-14-026334-9
Ostrom, Hans. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Ostrom, Hans and J. David Macey, eds. The Greenwood Encylclopedia of African American Literature. 5 volumes. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Patton, Venetria K. and Maureen Honey, eds. Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Perry, Jeffrey B. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Powell, Richard and David A. Bailey, editors. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 volumes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 and 1988.
Soto, Michael, ed. Teaching The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. ISBN 0-679-75889-5
Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice University Press, 1988.
Wintz, Cary D. Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007

[1] ttp://www.jcu.edu/harlem/French_Connection/page_1.htm

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