The Harlem Renaissance

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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 2

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

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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 4

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

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White Engines of Public Opinion and Change • Carl Van Doren’s 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."

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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 Church’s black congregation moved their church to Harlem

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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.

The "Harlem Hellfighters", the first African-American troops to go to war, performed for the troops and the French people and government officials, bringing jazz to France.

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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 9

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

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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

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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 12

“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.

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Alain Locke: “The New Negro” • “For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The March 1925 Survey Graphic

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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.

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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

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Alain Locke: “The New Negro”

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African Heritage • The modernist preoccupation with “primitive” models of African origin • The image of Africa and the values of authenticity and freedom from inhibition Aaron Douglas’ sketch for a mural for a four-panel series Aspects of Negro Life.

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African Heritage • Marcus Garvey’s UNIA posited Africa as the spiritual home of the blacks • Advocated a back-toAfrica policy • Political expression of the artistic preoccupation with “primitive” cultural sources William Johnson, Chain Gang

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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

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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

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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 22

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 23

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) • The encounter with rural African-American culture was the inspiration for most of the writers • Cane (1923) • Three parts that unify the northern and southern African-American experiences

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Cane’s Structure • The first part: 6 vignettes of southern women and 12 poems • The language: lyrical, mystical, and sensuous underlining the doubleness of black Southern life • The conflicts, pressures and the spiritual and moral beauty

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Cane’s Structure • The second part: a kaleidoscopic recounting of the death of black spirituality in a wasteland of urban materialism and technology • The final section: a drama, the spiritual search of a black northerner for identity in the land of his ancestors, in the South

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Cane’s Contribution • Highly praised upon publication • The revelation of the intrinsic beauty in black American culture in the face of white oppression

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Cane’s Contribution • A break-through in the canon of writing • The use of different genres opened up the avenue of experiments and innovations • After the publication of Cane Toomer continued his literary experiments in the field of drama, where he worked with expressionist techniques till 1929

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Toomer’s Dilemma • Embittered by the persistence of racial prejudice he stopped writing and claimed an American identity • Many have accused him of denying his ethnic heritage • For him that was the way to claim a multi-cultural identity and not a racial one

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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

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Life and Work • ”The race question" cost her career after gaining fame and recognition as one of the most vivid figures of the movement • Died in poverty, leaving an unmarked grave in Florida to be rediscovered by Alice Walker in the late 1970s • Fascinated by the richness of African American folklore and devoted many years to the collection and popularization of it 31

Hurston’s Life and Career

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Life and Work • • • •

Born in the all-black Eatonville, Florida The death of her mother Graduated from high school Held various scholarships and grants, which she used to study at Howard, where Alain Locke taught for many years • Specialized in folklore studies with Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist 33

Hurston’s Writings • Started writing short stories • Invited to come to New York to write for the Opportunity magazine • Contributed to the New Negro Anthology

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Hurston’s Works • In the 1930s started publishing the material gathered in folklore collections and travel writings • Contributed to Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology (1934)

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Hurston’s Works • Folklore collections: Mules and Man(1935), Tell my Horse(1938) • Novels: • Jonah's Gourd (1934) • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) • Moses: Man of the Mountain (1939) • Autobiography:Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) 36

Hurston’s Achievements • The best black woman writer in America • All her works express the communal culture of black southerners revealing at the same time their complicated world view, usually inaccessible for the outsiders • Much in the vein of Alain Locke’s ideas, Hurston believed that black culture is not what an outsider perceives 37

Hurston’s Achievements • Ambivalence expressed in the paradoxical identification with her home South • Makes herself at home in a segregated South by employing strategies of selfrepresentation very close to our postmodern understanding of the fluid, heterogeneous, subaltern, unstable identities of today

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Hurston’s Achievements • Reminds us also that the self is linked to history and community • And though the home can be an unstable community of others, its rich culture is the only means for the individuals to sustain their identities 39

Their Eyes Were Watching God • The story of Janie Crawford • Shows that the strength of an individual lies in the recognition of power in language • The ability to speak for oneself

Untitled (Harvest) by Jules André Smith

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Their Eyes Were Watching God • Claims that oppression functions not only along the race lines, but along the gender line as well • “The colored woman is the mule of the world” • Janie as Zora herself, managed to affirm her own identity because she had the courage to speak for oneself 41

Critical Discussions of the Novel • No unanimous agreement about the way female and male voices function in the book • Barbara Johnson in “Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God” : “the emergence of the protagonist’s voice is possible only when she recognizes the other’s word in it, her own self-difference and double-voicedness.” 42

Critical Discussions of the Novel • Mary Helen Washington “I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands: Emergent Female Hero”: the text reveals an actual silencing of Janie while privileging the male voices.

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Hurston’s Contribution • Together with Jean Toomer established a new narrative tradition • Henry Louis Gates, Jr calls it a “speakerly text”: • “Speakerly texts privilege the representation of the speaking black voice, of what the Russian Formalists called skaz and which Hurston … called “an oral book, a talking book” 44

Hurston’s Contributions • Refused to follow recipes for the representation of black life • Very skeptical towards the calls for racial solidarity of protest fiction, her credo was of “writing a novel and not a treatise on sociology” (in Hemenway 42) • Attacked by her male contemporaries, most notably Richard Wright 45

Hurston’s Views on Art • To oppose ideas of art as propaganda and art for art’s sake is to ignore the political implications of any act of writing, especially one that insists on the sovereignty of the black imagination • “For all sorts of complex historical reasons, the very act of writing has been a political act for the Black author.”(Gates 1990:5) 46

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) • Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri • Grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas • Lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico • A family of militant abolitionists Pastel drawing of Hughes by Winold Reiss

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Hughes’s Works • A novel fusion of jazz and blues with traditional verse in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) • First novel Not Without Laughter (1930) • A year (1932-1933) in the Soviet Union: his most radical verse • A year in Carmel, California: a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934)

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Hughes’ Works • Plays: Mulatto (1935), Little Ham (1936), Emperor of Haiti (1936). • In 1937 he spent several months in Europe, including a long stay in besieged Madrid • In 1938 founded the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which staged his agitprop drama Don't You Want to Be Free?, а vigorous blend of black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation

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Hughes’ Works • A volume of autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), written in an episodic, lightly comic manner, made virtually no mention of his leftist sympathies • A book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the blues • On the other hand, this collection, as well as another, his Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), strongly attacked racial segregation

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Hughes’ Works • After the WWII, two books of verse, Fields of Wonder (1947) and One-Way Ticket (1949), added little to his fame • Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) - new ground with verse accented by the discordant nature of the new bebop jazz that reflected a growing desperation in the black urban communities of the North 51

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"(1926) • “One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet--not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. 52

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"(1926) • And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” 53

Harlem Renaissance Writing • Huston A. Baker: “a complete expressive modernity was achieved only when “Harlem Renaissance” gave way to what might be called … “renaissancism” • By this term he suggests a “spirit of nationalistic engagement … that prompts the black artist’s awareness that his or her only possible foundation for authentic and modern expressivity resides in a discursive field marked by formal masterly and sounding deformation…

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Harlem Renaissance Writing •

“The blending, I want to suggest, of class and mass – poetic mastery discovered as a function of deformative folk sound – constitutes the essence of black discursive modernism.” Huston A. Baker

William H. Johnson, Swing Low Sweet Chariot National Museum of American Art

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