THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

1
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
2
The Harlem District

• In 1920s - the center of Black art and life
• A series of immigrant settlers but after WWI
  became the Black capital
• 117, 000 whites left Harlem as 87, 000 blacks
  moved in
• An extraordinarily rich cultural tradition
  indigenous American musical and literary forms as
  ragtime and jazz, poetry and prose

3
Socio-cultural background

• A massive social movement
• Internal migration from the rural South to the
  industrial North the percentage of blacks living
  outside the South rose from approximately 10 per
  cent in 1915 to 25 percent in 1940
• Segregation, the high tide of a reign of terror
  in the South, the failure of the
  post-Reconstruction America

4
Black Engines of Public Opinion and Change

• The National Association for the Advancement of
  Coloured People (NAACP)
• Crisis Magazine edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and
  Jessie Fauset, one of the major sources for the
  dissemination of writings by African Americans

5
Black Engines of Public Opinion and Change

• The National Urban League
• Opportunity, a sociology journal, edited by
  Charles S. Johnson
• The Universal Negro Improvement Association led
  by Marcus Garvey

6
White Engines of Public Opinion and Change

• Carl Van Dorens Century magazine
• Much faith in the black writers
• What American literature decidedly needs at this
  moment is color, music, gusto, the free
  expression of gay or desperate moods. If the
  Negroes are not in a position to contribute these
  items, I do not know what Americans are."

7
Periodization

• A decade of fairly clear communal and nationalist
  assertion for the African Americans
• Nathan Irvin Huggins (1971) starts with the year
  1914
• The same year is given by Jervis Andersen in This
  Was Harlem - 1900-1950 (1981)
• 1914 the year when St. James Presbyterian
  Churchs black congregation moved their church to
  Harlem

8
Beginnings

• David Levering Lewis, in When Harlem was in
  Vogue, puts the beginning in 1919 when the Black
  Regiment of the New York National Guard
  triumphantly returned from the War.

9
Beginnings

• Huston A. Baker, Jr. in Modernism and the Harlem
  Renaissance (1987) conceives of the period as the
  climax of the strategy employed by Booker T.
  Washington in his address before the Atlantic
  Exposition on September 1895

10
Duration

• The traditional view confines the Harlem
  Renaissance to the African-American works
  published between 1923 and 1929
• For Robert Stepto, in Columbia Literary History
  of the USA, it is unthinkable to exclude Richard
  Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks from the list of the
  Harlem Renaissance writers

11
Members

• The Talented Tenth Alain Locke, Jean Toomer,
  Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen,
  Zora Neal Hurston
• Other women writers Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset,
  Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gwendolyn B. Bennett,
  Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret
  Walker
• Other names Arna Bontemps, Sterling A. Brown,
  George Samuel Schuyler and Richard Wright

12
Name

• The Harlem Renaissance
• The Modern Negro Renaissance
• The New Negro Renaissance
• The New Negro An Interpretation, 1925, Alain
  Locke the image of the New Negro - full of a new
  spirit, renewed self-respect and self-dependence,
  who in fact was the Old Negro but exhibiting now
  his concealed self and thwarted potentialities

13
The New Negro

• The new Negro repudiated the fathers, who had
  achieved the stability, comfort, and the literacy
  of the middle class. He adopted a view of racial
  solidarity turning towards the lower class to
  find inspiration and material, to the anonymous,
  alienated, untutored 90 percent, living as
  sharecroppers down home or in the slums of the
  big cities.

14
Alain Locke The New Negro

• For generations the Negro has been the peasant
  matrix of that section of America which has most
  under-valued him, and here he has contributed not
  only materially in labor and in social patience,
  but spiritually as well.

The March 1925 Survey Graphic Harlem Number
15
Alain Locke The New Negro

• The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of
  his folk-temperament. In less than half a
  generation it will be easier to recognize this,
  but ... a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination
  and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making
  of the South from a humble, unacknowledged
  source.

16
Alain Locke The New Negro

• A second crop of the Negro's gift promises still
  more largely. He now becomes a conscious
  contributor and lays aside the status of a
  beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator
  and participant in American civilization.

From The Prince of Wales and other Famous
Americans by Miguel Covarrubias, 1924
17
Alain Locke The New Negro

• ... And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro
  should not be able to celebrate his full
  initiation into American democracy, he can at
  least... celebrate the attainment of a
  significant and satisfying new phase of group
  development, and with a spiritual Coming of Age.

18
African Heritage

• The modernist preoccupation with primitive
  models of African origin
• The image of Africa and the values of
  authenticity and freedom from inhibition

19
African Heritage

• Marcus Garveys UNIA posited Africa as the
  spiritual home of the blacks
• Advocated a back-to-Africa policy
• Political expression of the artistic
  preoccupation with primitive cultural sources

William Johnson, Chain Gang
20
Black Art and Culture

• Identification with the spirit of jazz
• Jazz can explain the whole black art
• Just like jazz, it seems unthought out,
  unintellectual, creating the impression that it
  is done on the spot

Romare Bearden
21
Jazz in the Harlem Renaissance

• Both the jazz musician and the writer do work
  hard to make their art appear so effortless
• The innovative use of jazz the play with
  different literary forms in fiction and mainly in
  poetry to express black culture
• Distinctly expressed in the poems of L. Hughes,
  Claude McKay, Countee Cullen

22
Jazz in the Harlem Renaissance

• The spirituals, blues and jazz became the basis
  of poetic expression
• Hughes entitled his first collection of poems
  published in 1925 The Weary Blues

23
Jazz in Harlem

• Jazz authorized
• - distrust of rationalism
• - celebration of sensuality
• - separateness from conventional society
• - belief in improvisation and authenticity of
  feeling
• The ideology not only of blacks but of whites