Harlem Renaissance

5 Key excerpts on "Harlem Renaissance"

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  Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance

  • Amy Helene Kirschke(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  So, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The simple answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro movement, or whatever name is preferred) was the most important event in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every aspect of African American literary and artistic creativity from the end of World War I through the Great Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this movement; it also affected politics, social development, and almost every aspect of the African American experience from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.

  But there was also something ephemeral about the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to define. The Harlem Renaissance, then, was an African American literary and artistic movement anchored in Harlem, but drawing from, extending to, and influencing African American communities across the country and beyond. We date it roughly from the end of the First World War through the Great Depression, but its roots extend well before the war and its legacy continued many years beyond the 1930s. It had no clearly defined beginning or end, but emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and then faded away in the mid- to late 1930s and early 1940s.

  Likewise the Harlem Renaissance has no single defined ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the movement. Instead, most participants in the movement resisted black or white efforts to define or narrowly categorize their art. For example, in 1926 a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, among others, produced their own literary magazine, Fire!! One purpose of this venture was the declaration of their intent to assume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the process they turned their backs on Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel black creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his young colleagues, Fire!! fizzled out after only one issue and the movement remained ill defined. In fact, this was its most distinguishing characteristic. There would be no common literary style or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more an identity than an ideology or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artist expression to the African American experience. If there was a statement that defined the philosophy of the new literary movement it was Langston Hughes’s essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in the Nation

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  The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature

  • D. Quentin Miller(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 The Era of the Harlem Renaissance

  The period known as the Harlem Renaissance (also called the “New Negro” Renaissance) is mostly associated with the 1920s, though its beginnings can be traced to the years just prior, and some of its spirit continued to exist in the years just after, until the Great Depression brought about a new set of issues that further changed the nature of African American literature. During the 1920s, an unprecedented amount of black writing was published and accepted by the white literary establishment, promising not only a better future for race relations, but, equally importantly, a new sense of black race pride. F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “The Jazz Age,” and the development of that musical form is central to other African American cultural developments at the time. But although some of the architects and builders of the Renaissance wanted it to be seen as a purely artistic movement, it is evident that the literary tug-of-war of the Reconstruction era between sociopolitical thought and art-for-art’s-sake continued.

  The word “renaissance” connotes a rebirth, but it also refers to a focused period of extraordinary cultural production. The Harlem Renaissance fulfills both connotations: a new optimism replaced the mood of cultural uncertainty that characterized black America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it manifested itself in a spectacular artistic outburst. There is some debate about whether or not the Harlem Renaissance was a spontaneous outpouring of art or a socially and politically manufactured phenomenon: a conscious attempt to atone for the failures of Reconstruction. David Levering Lewis writes, “The Harlem Renaissance was a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations in a time of extreme national backlash, caused in large part by economic gains won by Afro-Americans during the Great War” (xiii). Nathan Irvin Huggins begins his essential study of the movement with the observation, “It is a rare and intriguing moment when a people decide that they are the instruments of history-making and race-building” (3).

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  A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance

  • Cherene Sherrard-Johnson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  With such sentiments, Chesnutt passed the metaphorical torch of black representation and leadership to a new group of artists, hoping that they could capitalize on expanded opportunities for aesthetic experimentation, receptive publishing venues, and national and international recognition. But he and black writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had done much to lay the foundation for such literary developments. Especially during the period that Chesnutt (1999b) designates as the “post-bellum, pre-Harlem” era—marked at one end by the Civil War and black emancipation and, on the other, by Harlem’s population growth around the First World War—black artists established important institutions, networks, and artistic trends. However, the legacies of this postbellum, pre-Harlem period sometimes have been overlooked, especially because many Harlem Renaissance writers were eager to assert their own innovations by discrediting earlier ones. In order to historicize the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, students of the period might return to Chesnutt’s “own day,” examining how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers established models in periodical publishing, passing narratives, dialect literature, domestic fiction, psychological realism, and historical romances. Harlem Renaissance artists alternately would dismiss, revise, and embrace these developments in the quest for New Negro expression.

  The Emergence of New Negro Literary Culture

  When Alain Locke announced the emergence of the “New Negro” in his 1925 Harlem Renaissance manifesto, his call for a black identity marked by racial pride was perhaps less “new” than he claimed. Locke proposed, “the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority” (1997, 4). But the concept of the “New Negro” had circulated long before Locke’s proclamation. Though critics disagree over the exact origins and definition of this concept, many black Americans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were identifying themselves as “New Negroes”: people of African descent who, through bold self-expression and action, would transcend the legacies of slavery and the limitations of racial injustice. As one commentator proposed in 1898, anticipating the turn of the century, “[t]hen again 1900 being a new century we can truly boast and call ourselves the New Negro (or New Afro-American or whatever name we may adopt) … as this will be the first time the Negroes of the United States have started in with a new century as free men and citizens” (“Great National Gathering” 1898). Central to this assertion was the idea that black people actively and freely would define themselves rather than accepting white society’s artistic, legal, and social prescriptions of blackness.

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  Langston Hughes

  The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence

  • C. James Trotman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Langston Hughes & the Blues . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
• Wall, Cheryl A. “Poets and Versifiers, Singers and Signifiers: the Women of the Harlem Renaissance.” VirginiaLussier and KennethWheeler, eds. Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and New York . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982.
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Langston Hughes: Poetry, Blues, and Gospel—Somewhere to Stand

Steven C. Tracy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315861593-10

The Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes once said, “Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth.” Literary artists, too, must find their places to stand in order to move the earth. And certainly the best of them plant their feet where the ground seems to them to be most stable, especially when their mission is to move the firmament from the shoulders of Atlas onto their own, to provide some new, revolutionary, and mountainous foundation for our visionary dreams. In the midst of that Modernist revolution we know as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, there was a figure who sought to change the way we looked not only at art and African Americans, but also at the world. His vision was modernistic: experimental, both spontaneous and improvisatory and thoughtfully and carefully crafted, at times primitivistic, disjunctive, and cacophonous, rejecting artificial middle-class values, promoting emotional and intellectual freedom, and, above all, life- and love-affirming—self-affirming. And not only affirming of the African American self, though certainly Langston Hughes spent a lifetime climbing the racial mountain and living and affirming an African American self, but also affirming what Ralph

Ellison called in Invisible Man