Maureen Honey
As we enter a period of centennial moments associated with the Harlem Renaissance, it is significant that contemporary interest in that early twentieth‐century cultural awakening shows no signs of abating. The scholarship continues to flourish, and we are still recovering new primary work after nearly five decades of bringing lost texts back into print, since most of them had vanished shortly after they were first published. New biographies over the past 20 years of visual artists, writers, performers, intellectuals, and public figures deepen our understanding of what was then known as the New Negro Renaissance. Why are we still drawn to this iconic moment of the early twentieth century when our current dawning century furnishes us with its own extraordinary array of African American authored literature, drama, film, music, art, philosophy, and performance? What are the issues embedded in this past Jim Crow era that resonate with us today? What is it we are looking for or needing to understand in that first generation of modern artists and thinkers? This chapter speculates on possible reasons for this contemporary interest through a review of recent scholarship on the Renaissance, as well as a look backward at views of the period that preceded it.
Part of the answer to the questions I’ve posed here is that what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance represents the most dynamic and complex production of African American art in the twentieth century until the Black Arts movement came about during the 1960s. So powerful was this artistic resurgence in the century’s third decade that it continues to beckon even after it was declared an irrelevant relic of a bygone age by at least 1950. George Hutchinson describes well the effort to declare Renaissance writers outmoded, the genesis of which he locates far earlier than the 1950s:
By the early to mid‐1930s, several [African American] writers were identifying the renaissance with tendencies they wished to put behind them. Thus began an attempt to identify the movement with a particular ideology or set of naïve assumptions, a “school” of thought or a particular class bias. […] [T]he New Negro Renaissance, increasingly identified specifically with Harlem and the “Negro Vogue” of the 1920s, became the “whipping boy” of later generations seeking to establish their own authority over what black literature could or should be and do.
(Hutchinson 2007: 7)
Compounded by what Michael Bibby (2013) calls the racial formation of modernist studies, the Harlem Renaissance was all but dead and buried by 1971, when Nathan Huggins both revived interest in it and cast a pall over its legacy by concluding it was, in many respects, a failure.1
Despite its demise at that point, writers and scholars coming of age in the 1970s, particularly women, began to excavate a rich literary tradition that had been left in the shadows by the New Criticism, modernist studies, and a Black Arts definition of race activism that took hold in the militant 1960s. Alice Walker led the charge to bring Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) back into print during the 1970s, for example, and erected a tombstone in the cemetery where Hurston had been buried in an unmarked grave.2 By the late 1980s, Nella Larsen’s novellas, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), had also been reprinted, along with Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1928). Biographies of both men and women followed on the heels of Robert Hemenway’s path‐breaking biography of Hurston in 1977, most notably of Langston Hughes.3 Foundational revisionist scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance was also under way at this time, with the appearance of David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981) and Houston A. Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), bringing the 1920s arts movement once again into the spotlight in new ways.
Ever since that late twentieth‐century resurrection of the Harlem Renaissance, we have been debating its parameters and defining its characteristics and significance even as we add names to the core list of African American luminaries who have come to represent the era. Although everyone has a different set of people they would place on this list, common central figures have included Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alice Dunbar‐Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, Aaron Douglas, Josephine Baker, A’lelia Walker, Bessie Smith, and Jacob Lawrence. At this point in time, I would add to that list of core figures the following set of writers and artists whose work and lives have taken on ever‐increasing significance over recent decades: Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, Anita Scott Coleman, Fenton Johnson, Richard Bruce Nugent, Rudolph Fisher, Augusta Savage, Ethel Waters, Florence Mills, Oscar Micheaux, Archibald Motley, William H. Johnson, and Romare Bearden, to name just a few. Both lists are debatable and incomplete, but they indicate how much attention the Harlem Renaissance has received in the last 40 or so years. Slowly but steadily, we are expanding our criteria for deciding who it is we need to teach, study, and read so that women in particular, but also gays and lesbians, working‐class people, transnational figures, and a host of others are restored to their rightful place in the movement’s multilayered, rich complexity.
Another reason the Renaissance continues to generate scholarly debate is that we’ve been unable definitively to mark its beginning and end points, which, paradoxically, has led us into unexpected avenues of discovery. When deciding on our own list of which figures to include in our collection Double‐Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001), for example, Venetria Patton and I wrestled mightily with the time frame, as do all anthologists of this unwieldy period. We knew that we wanted to expand the boundaries of traditional collections in order to include equal numbers of essays and selections from all the creative genres by both men and women. We wanted to highlight the importance of new and old musical forms, such as the blues, jazz, and spirituals, by incorporating lyrics from iconic songs. Feeling the need to showcase the wide variety of visual art that played a key role in defining the New Negro, we inserted illustrations from period magazines. Finally, we embraced the often omitted genre of drama as a foundational element of the Renaissance, including nearly the full text of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916). Our goal was to present a more inclusive and wide‐ranging textbook beyond the traditional set of predominantly male‐authored essays, poems, and fiction that had come to be associated with the period. To facilitate that widening, however, we found ourselves responding to the call by feminist critics, such as Gloria Hull and Cheryl A. Wall, to expand the timeline of the era as well as its geographical boundaries, the narrow parameters of which left out the bulk of women’s texts (Hull 1987; Wall 1995). We decided to establish its beginning with the production of Grimké’s play in 1916, which featured New Negro characters, because it was the first drama by an African American playwright to be put on stage, and to mark its end with Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, because the novel was the last major work with recognizably New Negro themes and characters. Seemingly to us at the time, the ascendancy of urban realism with the publication of Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1939) and Native Son (1940), along with Ann Petry’s The Street (1945), signaled a sea change in African American letters sounding the death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.
Our anthology appeared over 15 years ago as I write this, but periodization remains a vexing issue, and the parameters have widened even beyond those on which we settled, though the consensus falls roughly around the time frame we identified. There is general agreement that the decade of the 1920s represents its zenith, and that pivotal moments of the Harlem Renaissance include (though are not limited to) the march up Fifth Avenue of the 369th “Harlem Hellfighters” Regiment in 1919 along with publication that year of Claude McKay’s fierce anti‐lynching sonnet, “If We Must Die”; the huge success of the Broadway hit Shuffle Along in 1921; the appearance of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetry collection Bronze and McKay’s Harlem Shadows in 1922; Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923; the Civic Club Dinner of 1924, held by Opportunity magazine editor Charles S. Johnson, which brought together white publishers and black writers; Alain Locke’s The New Negro and Countee Cullen’s first collection, Color, in 1925; Josephine Baker’s sensational Paris performances in La Revue Nègre also in 1925; Langston Hughes’s first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, in 1926; Hughes’s call that same year for a new kind of African American writing in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”; Zora Neale Hurston’s iconic story “Sweat” appearing in Fire!! in 1926; and the late 1920s novels of Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman.
These are points of agreement, however, that mask a larger problem of how to define this African American component of early twentieth‐century American literature. Although, as Cherene Sherrard‐Johnson says in her introduction to A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, “the Harlem Renaissance, at its core, was an era of artistic activism most scholars agree began in the early twentieth century and waned prior to the Second World War,” we are continuing to wrestle with the question of when this key cultural awakening began and when it ended (Sherrard‐Johnson 2015: 1). The essays in that 2015 volume participate in what Sherrard‐Johnson calls “the long Harlem Renaissance,” beginning with Carla Peterson’s look backward at New York City in the nineteenth century and ending with Margo Crawford’s linking of the Renaissance with the Black Arts movement, as well as Vaughn Rasberry’s reflections on the “lost years” of the 1940s.4 The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance locates the period within a time frame of 1918–1937, although Hutchinson’s introduction emphasizes that “periodization is always artificial and approximate” (Hutchinson 2007: 7). In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994), David Levering Lewis ascribes the years 1917–1935 to the movement, from the opening of American theater to black dramatic actors in 1917 to the Harlem Riot of 1935, and he places a great deal of importance on World War I and the race riots of 1919 as watershed events ushering in the concept of the New Negro. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay present a timeline of 1919–1940 in their Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997). These studies represent a rough consensus about the Renaissance as a phenomenon that predated Jazz Age Harlem and lasted well into the 1930s.
A strictly literary approach recently taken by A. Yemisi Jimoh, however, leads her to conclude that 1930 largely marks the endpoint of New Negro literature, bringing us full circle back to our earliest formulations of when Harlem was in vogue from World War I through the 1920s. Jimoh separates the broader New Negro movement from the Harlem Renaissance by focusing on creative writers and locating common elements in their work at different points along the continuum of New Negro literature. Because the literature of the Renaissance has been indiscriminately associated with non‐literary artistic production, she maintains, mapping out its terrain has been impeded even as she recognizes the dialectical relationship of writing to other art forms:
The emphasis […] on literature in no way separates writers from other cultural producers […] during the cultural moment many people frequently refer to as the Harlem Renaissance. This literary emphasis merely indicates that by marking the literary terrain alongside other cultural products, we make possible a rich and full understanding of the New Negroes and their art. Indeed, quite frequently for New Negroes, literary art and other art forms operated as intertexts.
(Jimoh 2015: 492)
Preferring to call it “the New Negro Movement in literature in the early decades of the twentieth century,” Jimoh’s meticulous examination of what these writers had in common leads her to conclude that the more conservative time frame of 1915–1930 best defines this period in literature, the hallmarks of which include (though are not limited to) “use of vernacular speech and realistic depictions of folk materials (including urban folk), music, biting satire, and representations of New Negro middle‐class life” (Jimoh 2015: 510). Looking at literary characteristics of black writers, Jimoh concludes that the 1930s and 1940s produced “a fundamentally different literature” than the preceding 15 years: “The wider social and political project of the New Negro, which I locate chronologically from at least 1895 until 1965, intersected with the New Negro Movement in literature from 1915 until 1930” (Jimoh 2015: 515).
These somewhat conflicting views of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance suggest the challenges involved in defining the African American literary tradition, from nineteenth‐century slave narratives to early and modern New Negro literature to black Chicago/proletarian leftist/urban realist writers of the 1930s through the Double Victory campaign of World War II, even to the late modernist writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Melvin Tolson, and others after the war. There are general period outlines of how to characterize this tradition, but these are guideposts without hard and fast rules. Uniting this diverse scholarship of the past 40 years, on the other hand, is agreement that the Harlem Renaissance was a modern form of the larger New Negro movement, which began in the 1890s, composed of uplift organizations determined to redefine the image of black people fashioned largely in the South but ubiquitous throughout the country in the wake of Reconstruction. Erin D. Chapman describes the New Negro throughout this pre‐Harlem era as an urban figure representing the Great Migration of black people from South to North at the turn of the century into the second decade: “The New Negro was an urban phenomenon. […] In recreating themselves as New Negroes, the younger generation of African Americans rebelled against longstanding and newly developed stereotypes of black people, especially the New South’s idealized image of the docile African American laborer quietly conforming to the needs of white‐dominated capitalism in the segregated South” (Chapman 2015: 69). Meredith Goldsmith similarly defines the break between Old and New Negro as a generational and geographical divide emerging at the turn into a new century but flowering in the 1920s: “As Ezra Pound charged his modernist compatriots to ‘Make it new,’ Harlem Renaissance intellectuals posited a similar rupture with nineteenth‐century culture that was often cast in generational terms. Locke’s New Negro anthology created a decisive split between the New (younger) and the ‘old Negro,’ whose mentality was rooted in the nineteenth‐century legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction” (Goldsmith 2015: 259).
James Smethurst adds to this portrait of the New Negro as a modern American inhabiting multiple industrializing cities an international political dimension of what made the Renaissance a distinctly cohesive next step forward from the earlier New Negro era:
What made the idea of a “Renaissance” in the more modern artistic and political sense of a “birth” rather than a “rebirth” plausible and even convincing? It was the connection of African American literature and art to a matrix of intersecting national and international avant‐garde or vanguard movements[,] […] nationalist movements of the internal colonies of the great European empires […] as well as the exponential growth of freedom movements in the external colonies and among African‐descended people. […] Another movement was the post‐Bolshevik Revolution international Left.
(Smethurst 2015: 80)
Like Smethurst in his 2015 essay, scholars have been long coalescing around the diasporic nature of this movement from rural to urban, South to North, that had come to be defined too narrowly by the geography of Harlem. Jimoh, along with others, points out the many problematic consequences of using the term “Harlem Renaissance” to describe its literature in that New Negro writers “tended not to make Harlem the center of events” even though Harlem was at the epicenter of cultural changes sweeping through cities across the United States and Europe during the 1920s. She quotes Sterling Brown on the subject, who insisted early on that the Harlem Renaissance was a misnomer: “Most of the writers were not Harlemites. […] The New Negro movement had temporal roots in the past and spatial roots elsewhere in America” (quoted in Jimoh 2015: 502). Feminists especially have urged us to expand our frame beyond Harlem because most women writers could not afford to move to Harlem as many of the men did. Although Fiona I.B. Ngô concentrates on New York City and Harlem in her description of newly arrived immigrants and thriving cabarets, she underlines the ethnic heterogeneity of New York residents, not only from the Caribbean, but from imperial sites around the globe, such as Asia, India, the Pacific islands, Africa, and Latin America:
[T]he domestic or national organization of race and sex during the Jazz Age, and in New York City as an exemplar of this period’s sensibilities, cannot be understood except in the context of the growing ambitions of modern U.S. empire […] [which] played a large part in the creative imagination that guided the design of interiors, the making of music, and even the naming of spaces within the Empire City. […] Aesthetic production in the Jazz Age was guided through imperial metaphor, read as dangerous through interracial contact, and rendered alluring through the sexualization of space.
(Ngô 2014: 4, 11)
Michael Soto’s exploration of the dynamic ties between Langston Hughes and Latin America represents yet another significant widening of the geographical boundaries surrounding the Harlem Renaissance. Soto reminds us that Hughes wrote his signature poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921), while he was on a train to Mexico for a visit with his father, and that Hughes was just as popular in that country and Cuba as he was in the United States, both places where he cultivated relationships with artists such as Diego Rivera and Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. He points out that the artist who illustrated Hughes’s first collection, The Weary Blues (1926), was Mexican native Miguel Covarrubias, “who as a very young man provided much of our visual understanding of Jazz Age Harlem with his highly stylized illustrations” (Soto 2015: 445). Soto calls for investigation, not only of Hughes’s extensive connections with Latin America, but of mapping new terrain in the New Negro modern era, an Afro‐Latino component of the Harlem Renaissance:
Much as blackness is mediated by different styles of English in, say, rural Georgia or cosmopolitan Harlem, blackness (negrura) in Central America, South America, or the Hispanic Caribbean announces itself in differently accented Spanish. […] The means by which Harlem Renaissance cultural artifacts disseminate throughout greater America, either in English or more often in translation, yield new and exciting modes of appreciating the all‐too‐familiar movement.
(Soto 2015: 444)
The New Negro of the Harlem Renaissance, in other words, was a transnational figure who, by the 1920s, symbolized not only a resurgence of nationalist pride around the globe and the overthrow of corrupt regimes, but an expressive vitality associated with new rhythms, the body, and exuberant sound, both here, abroad, and across the border.
Related to this wider multicultural lens is that a major feature of recent research on the Harlem Renaissance re‐sutures it to the birth of an American modernism that was imagined as ethnically diverse, democratic, and working class. Rather than a unique moment within the African American literary tradition, separate from the modernist canon, New Negro writers have been reimagined as integral to the shaping of a modern literature in tune with these distinctly American characteristics in the early twentieth century. Mark Morrisson articulates the nationalist and internationalist impulses of the larger modernist landscape framing the New Negro Renaissance in what he calls “American literary nationalism”: “The nationalistic sense that America was a special country, a new country on the verge of a major cultural renaissance, was widespread in the pre‐First World War period” (Morrisson 2005: 14). Morrison asserts that American modernism took the form of a melting‐pot progressive nativism that embraced ethnic diversity and working‐class vernacular art forms best symbolized by its precursor and New American Poetry idol, Walt Whitman: “The most popular conception of an American canon at the time was based upon a poetics of presence” represented by Whitman, “the poet who, for many, most captured those ‘national’ features of vigor, flux, ingenuity, democracy, and almost careless exuberance” (Morrison 2005: 15). Mark A. Sanders pinpoints the central role of black artists in shaping American modernism at this time even as “the modernist era witnessed the nadir of race relations in America”:
[S]everal strands of heterodox modernism – “native” modernism and Afro‐modernism in particular – addressed what looked to be the stalled projects of democratic development and nation building. Pragmatism, Boasian anthropology, cultural pluralism, and the nativist project of cultural identification began to define a distinctly American form of modernism […] loose schools of thought that […] informed New Negro artistic development, and in turn relied heavily on black participation.
(Sanders 2005: 130)
Scholars have concentrated especially on modernist poetry within this historical framework and revealed the central role of African American men and women in the free verse revolution spearheaded by Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Harriet Monroe, and others in the century’s second decade. As Sanders says of the early modernist poets on this side of the Atlantic: “Rather than heightened fragmentation, this strand of American modernism stressed synthesis […] looking to indigenous sources for inspiration […] for the re‐conception of American cultural identity” (Sanders 2005: 132). Not only did Boston’s African American editor William Stanley Braithwaite supply a crucial link between New Negro and white poets with his yearly Anthology of Magazine Verse (1913–1920), but bohemian artistic circles from Harlem to Greenwich Village to Paris brought black and white writers together in mutually influential ways. Although the modernist poetic canon came later to be defined as the domain of a handful of white male “high modernists,” the original conception was eclectic, multicultural, diverse, and inclusive. As Morrisson says of Harriet Monroe: “Her ideal developed out of a progressivist vision of American culture that saw a blending of different racial and ethnic strains as the country’s strength” (Morrisson 2005: 17). Along with Braithwaite and Monroe, Louis Untermeyer and Amy Lowell also envisioned the New Poetry as racially and culturally diverse. In The New Era in American Poetry (1919), Untermeyer praised Anne Spencer and Claude McKay as exemplary voices in modern free verse poetry, along with the rich stream of what he called “native rhythms”: the “medley of clans and nationalities [is sufficient evidence] that America is truly a melting pot in a poetic as well as an ethnic sense” (Untermeyer 1919: 356). Two years earlier, Lowell had proclaimed in her critical review of six modern American poets that they were “fusing exotic modes of thought with their Anglo‐Saxon inheritance. This is indeed the melting pot”: “An exclusive Anglo‐Saxon civilization does not fit our multiracial population” (Lowell 1917: 177).
Michael Bibby summarizes what is now a prodigious amount of scholarship on the modernist poetic canon shaped by Southern Agrarian and New Criticism movements of the 1930s–1950s, which featured white male poets at the expense of women and writers of color up through the 1970s, when feminist and ethnic studies scholarship recuperated texts by black writers we are now restoring to the American literary canon. In “The Disinterested and Fine: New Negro Renaissance Poetry and the Racial Formation of Modernist Studies” (2013), Bibby documents the absence of articles on New Negro writers or the Harlem Renaissance in major scholarly literary journals of the 1920s–1960s, such as American Literature, PMLA, and College English. Bibby locates this exclusionary record within a racist underpinning of New Critical perspectives taking root in American universities through the middle of the twentieth century, when segregation continued to impose the color line beyond World War II. Even more troubling is what Bibby sees as a persistent privileging of white figures, fiction writers and visual artists included, in modernist studies today even though so much of our scholarship has recovered the diverse roots of modern American literature: “Although contemporary research has shown that New Negro culture was integral to American modernism, research in modernist studies overwhelmingly focuses on white authors. […] [T]he outmoded and delegitimized racial ideologies of former Southern Agrarians have survived or ended up being rearticulated in modernist studies in an age that has supposedly moved past such ideologies” (Bibby 2013: 486, 493).5
In my own recent work on the modernism of lyric poetry by Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery, I explore the ways that they and other women poets have fallen between the cracks of two major critical models, one of which Bibby has summarized here, and it serves as an example of how we are rethinking the modernist era. These African American women writers have been left in the shadows of modernist studies, which tends to focus on white writers, and scholarship on modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, which favors prose or male poets. Although fiction writers Hurston, Larsen, West, and (to a degree) Fauset are now at the center of conversations about the period, women poets are still understudied. Revisionist Harlem Renaissance scholarship is beginning to reframe them, as well as men who used traditional formats, within both the New Negro and modernism’s free verse movements. Whether expressed in new poetic formats such as imagism or in nineteenth‐century forms like the sonnet, New Negro lyric verse is now being reassessed as original or new because it infused a foundational poetic form with radical content.
This marginalization of women writers in past scholarship is now well on its way to breaking down due to insightful critiques of New Negro ideology regarding gender roles. Nina Miller was one of the first to assert that because New Negro literature of the street was considered a male domain, women writers were walled off from the major scene of urban racial subjects by gender boundaries: “This essential aesthetic was the acknowledged domain of a largely masculine avant‐garde elite who staked out the street and the urban, working‐class life they found there as the site of their resistance to the racial establishment and the bourgeois values it promoted” (Miller 1999: 211). Miller posits that, confronted with the unacceptable choice of being either black or female in poetry, women elected the lyric mode as a space where they could be both. New Negro poetry has been largely defined as innovative based on its use of the vernacular, jazz rhythms, folk culture, or the blues – all associated with male writers – an assessment Jane Kuenz describes as damaging to women: “a narrative of aesthetic development that moved away from conventional lyrics […] toward authentically realized folk forms […] broadly characterized [women poets’] work […] as bourgeois, racially empty, and feminine” (Kuenz 2007: 508).
Ajuan Maria Mance and others reiterate the dilemma women writers faced when a racial identification as black was conflated with a New Negro figure who was male. She believes that a surface, non‐racial sensibility in women’s poetry of the Harlem Renaissance resulted from this conflict:
The centrality of the Black male experience of racism to the Harlem Renaissance aesthetic of racial uplift left little room for considering some of the specific effects of prejudice on the lives of African American women […] Thus, the female subjects who appear in Black women’s poetry […] are carefully selected to avoid any imagery, syntax, subject matter, or setting that might suggest the Blackness […] of the speaking subject.
(Mance 2007: 71)
Chapman’s work on images of the New Negro Woman in Opportunity magazine adds to what Mance is saying about the bind faced by middle‐class women when Chapman points to a male‐centered emphasis in the period’s ideology, a motherhood ideal that undermined both women’s sexual freedom and self‐determination: “In the scholarship of [E. Franklin] Frazier and [Charles S.] Johnson and in the pages of Opportunity, the race motherhood ideals of womanly self‐sacrifice and deference to male authority, a man‐centered perspective on the effects of racial oppression, and advocacy of the establishment of black patriarchy as a primary goal of racial advancement are repeated over and over again” (Chapman 2012: 17). Chapman highlights a small group of women prose writers – Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Marita Bonner – who challenged these patriarchal gender norms by depicting intimate and sexual modernity for black women as self‐defining: “They were bold enough to reveal their private, emotional, and sexual selves in order to explore the intimate effects of combined racial and sexual oppression” (Chapman 2012: 18). Meredith Goldsmith similarly praises the modern heroines of Jessie Fauset’s work. Focusing on Plum Bun, Goldsmith notes that its heroine, Angela Murray, is a New Woman with the freedom to form intimate relationships and a career while the many other women characters represent multiple versions of femininity, highlighting its performative nature. Goldsmith notes the diverse roles she lays out for modern women characters in her fiction even as Fauset employs techniques of nineteenth‐century women writers: “With their multiple minor characters, ever‐expanding plotlines, and seemingly throwaway scenes and episodes, Fauset’s novels try to account not only for a range of African American experience but also for a broad range of cultural experiences of women across race and generation” (Goldsmith 2015: 260).
Recuperating the central role that black writers played in American modernism, as well as the role women writers played in the New Negro Renaissance, helps balance the racist stereotypes that have come down to us from the 1920s and 1930s in both popular culture and the modernist canon. A key element in this restoration has been the work done on working‐class women, especially in the performative and visual arts. Although scholars have long positioned blues singers, such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, as central to the period’s urban modernity, and spotlighted Josephine Baker, who came to symbolize sexuality unbound in the Jazz Age, new studies are featuring less famous dancers, singers, and actors as performative artists with cultural weight. Jayna Brown, for example, roots chorus lines in Darktown Follies of 1913, Shuffle Along of 1921, and Blackbirds of 1928 to central components of the vogue for Harlem: “For a black constituency during the 1920s, black chorus women were important figures of hopeful migratory movement, urban ebullience, and promise” (Brown 2008: 191). Bracketing her discussion of these anonymous dancers, along with stars like Florence Mills, Ada Overton Walker, and Adelaide Hall, Brown adds to our understanding of the black vernacular by framing their stagecraft as expressive of a modern New Negro culture taking shape in the heart of New York City. Brown participates in what she calls “a true flowering of scholarship […] on performance theory, theater history, and dance”: “Expressive cultural forms are now beginning to receive true critical attention in current interdisciplinary dialogues on performance, race, space, gender, and the body” (Brown 2008: 3). Chapman extends Brown’s analysis by showcasing the central role such images of women performers played in black popular culture during the 1920s: “The New Negroes sought to accomplish self‐transformation and social change not only through the didactic speeches and publications their predecessors in the Reconstruction generation had used but more significantly through their participation as producers, consumers, and commodities in […] the sex‐race marketplace” (Chapman 2012: 7).
Performative studies of women during the Harlem Renaissance are also being linked to modern visual art, film, architecture, photography, music, and other modes of expression both in the black community and in wider cultural arenas. Cherene Sherrard‐Johnson (2007) was one of the first to describe representations of New Negro women in art, literature, and film as expressions of both African American exuberance and anxiety about modernity. More recently, James Donald emphasizes Josephine Baker’s international appeal as a symbol of modern attitudes toward the body and the embodiment of American jazz even as she enacted primitivist stereotypes about Africa as an alternative to Victorian repression: Baker represented a “new positive attitude toward change, […] a new sense of the body and sexuality, and modernity experienced, viscerally, as rhythm” (Donald 2015: 18). Donald focuses on Baker as a symbol of jazz modernism, while Anne Anlin Cheng links her to European (as well as American) fascination with display of surfaces in architecture, photography, the stage, and film, particularly “racialized skin”: “Modernist rejection of the nineteenth century fetishization of ornamentation turns out to rely on a fetishization of bareness. […] essence has merely been displaced from interiority to exteriority” (Cheng 2011: 35). For Cheng, Josephine Baker’s nudity was a “second skin” that she wore on the stages of Paris and Berlin as a representation of modernity’s “primitive” life force.
The performance studies dimensions of scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance add to the recuperation of literary works lost at mid‐century by men and women alike while building on the work of scholars who have restored women as central participants in the New Negro Renaissance, both as artists and as cultural workers. I suspect that it will be in this area that new work on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual components of the New Negro era will be coming to the fore shortly since figures such as Richard Bruce Nugent are attracting the attention of those studying theater, dance, film, photography, and other performative or visual genres. Ngô (2014), for example, sees Nugent’s illustrations in his Drawing for Mulattoes series of 1927 as collapsing gendered, ethnic, sexual, and class binaries. She similarly explicates Nella Larsen’s and Wallace Thurman’s fiction as blurring the line between black and Asian, male and female, straight and gay, a sensibility she describes as “Queer Aesthetic Practices in the Age of Empire” (Ngô 2014: 78). This blurring of the lines between color, class, and gender also underlies Shane Vogel’s assessment of queer studies being done on the Harlem Renaissance when he characterizes the era as a pivotal transition moment:
The Harlem Renaissance occurred at a key moment in the history of modern sexuality, when concepts of same‐sex desire were unevenly transforming from a model of gender inversion […] to a model of sexual object choice (where sexuality was defined by the gender of the person to whom one was attracted). […] This [early twentieth century] history of identifying and classifying sexual norms and their deviations was deeply intertwined with how non‐white bodies and cultures were perceived in the US in the same period by sexology and sociology.
(Vogel 2013: 269)
Having recovered the hidden history of “twilight love” and drag balls in Harlem, key literary texts such as Angelina Weld Grimké’s unpublished lesbian verse, and the same‐sex attractions of central New Negro figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar‐Nelson, and many others, we are now at the point of connecting the dots between queer aesthetics, literary production, transnational cultural exchanges, performative modalities of modernism, and New Negro challenges to the color line.
Returning to my opening question about why the Harlem Renaissance continues to fascinate despite unresolved controversies about when and where it actually happened or just what it represents, I want to spotlight Harlem’s compelling appeal in our current cultural imaginary, even beyond the abundance of secondary literature in specialized fields of academia. A recent snapshot of the image Harlem conveys in our contemporary cultural landscape is the 2016 exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem.” Featuring photo‐essays Parks and Ellison put together in 1948 and 1952, the curators have identified newly discovered photographs that showcase postwar despair, disillusionment, and loneliness as African Americans in America’s largest city continued to suffer the debilitating effects of segregation and racist employment patterns. Made yet more powerful by their contrast to New Negro hopefulness when Harlem beckoned as a promised land in the Great Migration, the Parks/Ellison photo‐essays “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948) and “A Man Becomes Invisible” (1952) seem to document a death spiral for Harlem in the wake of its artistic renaissance that has ominously forecast a new kind of erasure 100 years later. As the New York Times reported in its 2016 feature article “The End of Black Harlem,” gentrification is pushing the bulk of black people out of their symbolic capital and replacing their distinctive churches, restaurants, and cafes with chain stores and high‐end real estate development (Adams 2016). Paula J. Massood describes this latest wave of economic growth as a challenge to contemporary Harlem’s identity as a black mecca and cultural center: “[T]he influx of big business threatens to transform the symbolic site of black America into nothing more than a carbon copy of middle – white – America” (Massood 2013: 1).
Despite these challenges to Harlem, Massood concludes that it is still, in many ways, the vibrant migration endpoint it was during the New Negro era, albeit frayed around the edges. Her framing of the borough as an iconic location for twentieth‐century American photography and film suggests one reason we still care about Harlem and its most famous era. She massages the 1920s when Harlem was in vogue backward to pre‐World War I silent films produced by William Foster and Hunter C. Haynes and forward through gangster film talkies in the 1930s to the Blaxploitation era of the 1970s and on to the 1990s films of Spike Lee, John Singleton, and others. In photography, Massood examines a vast range of images from New Negro representations of the bourgeoisie in the century’s first decades through James VanDerZee’s iconic Jazz Age photos to newspaper pictures of the Harlem riot in 1943 and mid‐century photo‐texts of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, on through Alice Attie’s photography in the early twenty‐first century. She documents these multiple visual iterations of Harlem over the past 11 decades and concludes that it is still an African American space and remains a symbol of black aspirational achievement: “Over the decades, Harlem has posed and reposed for us, suggesting a place that is at one and the same time resolutely historical and constantly in flux: material and imaginary, African American and American, national and multinational” (Massood 2013: 198). These images Massood assembles portray the danger in Harlem’s volatile mix of hedonism, living on the edge, and glamour within a neighborhood hemmed in by poverty and racism. But at the root of this mecca’s magnetic appeal, she suggests, is the notion that the self can be renewed, redefined, reconstructed in a black‐dominated cityscape teeming with diasporic energy and future possibility.
A final thread connecting us to that distant moment of thrilling migration to the promised land is that black artistic production in the early twentieth century, no matter how variable, was shaped by the hardening lines of Jim Crow segregation in the dawning new century as racially diverse migrants poured into urban centers of the North. The New Negro Renaissance fashioned a specifically cultural wedge to break through the color line by forging links between black artists and progressive white editors, theater producers, publishers, and other power brokers. The larger New Negro Movement in which it was embedded, however, was multi‐pronged and political in response to lynching, the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, minstrelsy in vaudeville, the ghettoizing of urban black neighborhoods, white mob attacks on those neighborhoods, and racist depictions in all forms of popular culture. The effort to present images of black people as educated, gifted, and literate, therefore, joined progressive and avant‐garde challenges to nineteenth‐century Victorian values within a framework of nativist violence in the wake of World War I. We are, a hundred years later, entering our own new century against a similarly jarring juxtaposition of hope and racism. The first black president left office after eight years having won twice by awakening a sense of youthful optimism echoing that of the Harlem Renaissance through his signature campaign line, “Yes, we can!” Barack Obama’s charismatic appeal to Europe and Africa, as well as the United States, similarly mirrors the international scope of Jazz Age fascination with Harlem’s cabaret culture. African Americans today dominate popular culture in the realms of music, dance, athletics, and style, just as they did in the 1920s. Although the millennial generation is arguably the most diverse, progressive, and multicultural we have ever seen, we have reached a second nadir of racist violence, poverty, incarceration rates, and multiple areas of American life in which the color line remains firmly in place. The more deeply we penetrate the Harlem Renaissance, the more clearly we see both America’s modernity over the past one hundred years and the nightmarish underbelly of its racist stranglehold. We are well beyond slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow South – at least on the surface – but, like the vogue for Harlem so long ago, our celebration of the new rests on platforms of the old. The history we think has been consigned to the past keeps on blasting its terrible legacy into our glorious present.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 7 (MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL); CHAPTER 11 (PROLETARIAN LITERATURE).