African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconciliation “the Negro’ apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs.
Never nominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.
The background: The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights pavement of the late asses and early asses. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs.
Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropolises such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast. The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations.
Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist Journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black labor union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Gravers Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the major authors or artists identified with Gravers “Back to Africa” movement, even if they contributed to the paper.
The renaissance had many sources in black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give Located Just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early asses was becoming virtually a black city within the borough of Manhattan.
Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 35th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angels, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and descended black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority.
As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation. While the renaissance built on earlier traditions of African American culture, it was profoundly affected by trends-?such as primitivism-?in European and white American artistic circles. Modernist primitivism was inspired partly by Freudian psychology, but it tended to extol “primitive” peoples as enjoying a more direct relationship to the natural world and to elemental human desires than “overfilled” whites.
The keys to artistic revolution and authentic expression, some intellectuals felt, would be found in the cultures of “primitive races,” and preeminent among these, in the stereotypical thinking of the day, were the cultures of sub-Sahara Africans and their descendants. Early in the 20th century, European avian-garden artists had drawn inspiration from African masks as they broke from realistic representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture.
The prestige of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on their African heritage with new eyes and in many cases with a desire to reconnect with a heritage Eng despised or misunderstood by both whites and blacks. Black heritage and American culture Harlem Renaissance: comparison with Italian Renaissances interest in black heritage coincided with efforts to define an American culture distinct from that of Europe, one that would be characterized by ethnic pluralism as well as a democratic ethos.
The concept of cultural pluralism (a term coined by the philosopher Horace Killeen in 1915) inspired notions of the United States as a new kind of nation in which diverse cultures should develop side by side in harmony rather than be “melted” together or ranked on a scale of evolving “civilization. W. E. B. Du Bois had advocated something like this position in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a defining text of the New Negro movement because of its profound effect on an entire generation that formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance.
As various forms of cultural-pluralist thought took hold, a fertile environment for the blossoming of African American arts developed. Moreover, the effort on the part of some American intellectuals to distinguish American literature and culture from European cultural forms dovetailed with African American intellectuals’ beliefs about their relationship to American national identity. Du Bois and his NAACP colleague James Weldon Johnson asserted that the only by African Americans.
They, more than any other group, had been forced to remake themselves in the New World, Du Bois and Johnson argued, while whites continued to look to Europe or sacrificed artistic values to commercial ones. (Native American cultures, on the other hand, seemed to be “dying out,” they claimed. ) African Americans’ centuries-long struggle for freedom had made them the prophets of democracy and the artistic vanguard of American culture. This Judgment began unexpectedly to spread as African American music, especially he blues and Jazz, became a worldwide sensation.
Black music provided the pulse of the Harlem Renaissance and of the Jazz Age more generally. The rise of the “race records” industry, beginning with Kook’s recording of Miami Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920, spread the blues to audiences previously unfamiliar with the form. Smith, Alberta Hunter, Clara Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rained-?who had been performing for years in circuses, clubs, and tent shows-?found themselves famous. Frequently ironic and often bawdy, the music expressed the longings and philosophical perspectives of the black working class. Black writers such as Longboats Hughes,
Sterling Brown, and Jean Toomey valued the blues as an indigenous art form of the country most oppressed people, a secular equivalent of the spirituals, and an antidote to bourgeois black assimilation. Out of the blues came Jazz, migrating to Northern urban centers such as Chicago and New York City during and after World War l. In the asses Jazz orchestras grew in size and incorporated new instruments as well as methods of performance. Louis Armstrong became the first great Jazz soloist when he moved from King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago to Fletcher Henderson band in New York City in 1924.
Henderson band soon had competitors in “big bands” led by the likes of Cab Galloway, Duke Elongating, Chick Webb, and Jimmie Luncheons-?not to mention such “white” bands as Paul Whitewash’s. Once associated with brothels and traveling circuses, Jazz gained respectability as a form of high art. Moreover, dance forms associated with Jazz, most famously the Charleston (also a product of the asses) and tap dance, became international fads as a result of hugely popular all-black musical revues.
The popularity of Jazz among whites helped spark a “Negro Vogue” in cities such as New York and Paris in the mid- to late asses. Simultaneously, European dramatists extolled the body language of African American dance and stage humor (descended from the blackjack minstrel show, the most popular and original form of American theatrical comedy). The best-known white man to bring attention to the Harlem Renaissance was undoubtedly Carl Van Bechtel, whose music criticism trumpeted the significance of Jazz and blues and whose provocatively titled novel Niger Heaven (1926) helped spread the Negro Vogue.
It served virtually as a tourist guide to Harlem, capitalizing on the supposed “exotic” aspects of black urban life even while focusing, armorial, on the frustrations of black urban professionals and aspiring writers. Although vilified by some, Van Bechtel became a key contact for several black artists was the Negro Vogue more evident than in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and Sconce’s Inn, which became especially popular with whites in the late asses.
Both of these nightclubs excluded blacks from the audience; others, called “black and tans,” catered to “mixed” audiences, while still others excluded whites so as to avoid the police raids to which black and tans were often subjected. The question of “Negro art” The international appeal of Jazz and its connection to common black life, accompanied by the sheer virtuosity of its musicians, encouraged black intellectuals in other fields to turn increasingly to specifically “Negro’ aesthetic forms as a basis for innovation and self-expression.
The tendency appeared in concert music, choral programs, and Broadway musicals as well as literature. Bobbie Blake and Noble Aisle’s musical revue Shuffle Along opened on Broadway in 1921 and established a model that would shape black musicals for 60 years. Florence Mills, a sprite’s dancer ND phenomenal singer, achieved enormous fame across racial lines in the United States and Europe before suddenly succumbing to appendicitis in 1927.
Josephine Baker, who began as a chorus girl in a popular revue, became an international star when La Revue negro opened in 1925 in Paris, where she ultimately settled as a celebrity and played a variety of “exotic” roles exploiting the glamour of the “primitive. ” Popular revues and vaudeville acts drew all-black audiences throughout the United States in cities on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit. In the asses black-produced shows came to Broadway again and again, and many white- reduced shows featured black casts.
The success of such shows helped fuel the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance. Amid worsening socioeconomic conditions in Harlem itself and political setbacks in what was a very conservative and racist era-?it was during the asses that the UK Klux Klan reached its peak in membership and political influence in the South and the Midwest-?some black leaders hoped that achievement in the arts would help revolutionize race relations while enhancing blacks’ understanding of themselves as a people. Important new publishing houses opened their doors to black authors.
These publishers-?particularly Alfred A. Knops, Harcourt Brace, and Bonn & Liveriest-? were breaking away from an earlier emphasis on British literary tradition. They were publishing translated Modernist works from a variety of nationalities previously unread in the United States except by immigrants in their native languages. Interested too in the notions of American cultural pluralism-?in some cases influenced by left-wing thought, in others involved in the drive for black civil rights-? and aware of the vogue of primitivism, they saw a market for black-authored books on “Negro’ topics.
Their interest was accelerated by the efforts of African American gazing editors who organized literary prize contests and other events showcasing black literary talent. The most often cited event of this sort was a banquet at the liberal Civic Club in downtown New York organized by Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, in 1924. The event had the effect of announcing what had come to resemble a “movement”-?a cohort of talented African American writers ready to be edited by Lain Locke, which sold well and garnered positive critical attention in addition to inspiring black readers and would-be authors.
Locke attempted to direct the “movement” he announced in The New Negro, stressing turn away from social protest or propaganda toward self-expression built on what he termed “folk values”-?a movement, in other words, akin to the Irish literary renaissance that had slightly preceded it. Yet the writers of the Harlem Renaissance were not unified in artistic aims or methods. Disagreement helps account for the renaissances importance. Locke believed that black authors and artists should develop distinct aesthetic tendencies inspired by African American folk sources and African traditions.
The satirist George Schuler lampooned the very idea of “Negro art” in America as “hokum” artificially stimulated by white decadents. Poetry Counted Culled, an early protoГ©gГ© of Locker’s, came to resist any suggestion that his racial background should determine his notion of poetic inheritance. Devoted to the examples of John Keats and Edna SST. Vincent Mildly, Culled considered the Anglo- American poetic heritage to belong as much to him as to any white American of his age.
In contrast, Hughes famously announced in his manifesto The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) that black poets should create a distinctive “Negro’ art, combating the “urge within the race toward whiteness. ” Welcome to Encircle?did Britannica Guide to Black Historiography’s position reveals how, in addition to primitivism, the tendency to press for “authentic” American art forms-?and to find them in black America-?led black writers to “the folk. Their focus on the folk also came at a time when American anthropologists influenced by Franz Boas were revolutionize their discipline with arguments against the racist paradigms of the past. The folk-?people of the rural South particularly, but also the new migrants to Northern cities-?were presumed to carry the seeds of black artistic development with relative autonomy from “white” radiations. Thus, James Weldon Johnson, beginning with his poem The Creation (1920) and then in the book God’s Trombones (1927), set traditional African American sermons in free-verse poetic forms modeled on the techniques of black preachers.
Inspired by Southern folk songs and Jazz, Toomey experimented with lyrical modifications of prose form in his dense and multilateral book Cane (1923), which to many seemed a radical new departure in writing about black life. Cane refrained from normalizing or explicit protest while the symbols, phrases, tones, and rhythms of black folk music and Jazz infused its structure. Weaving together poems, sketches, short stories, and dramatic narratives, the book seamlessly melded high Modernist literary techniques with African American style and subject matter that alternated between the rural South and the urban North.
Though it exposed the brutal effects of white supremacy, it did so without seeming to preach or normalize, and it dealt with sexuality more overtly than any preceding black-authored text in American literary Ironically, however, even as Toomey completed Cane, he thought of himself not as a Negro but as the first member of a “new race” resulting from a uniquely American mixture of Old World peoples. Denying identification with the “Negro renaissance,” he regarded the label Negro as inappropriate and limiting for his work.
Hughes, Longboats: influence of the blues on Hughes poetry exploring black vernacular speech and lyrical forms, Hughes, on the other hand, built his artistic project on identification with the Negro masses. Influenced by such contemporary white poets as Carl Sandburg and Vacate Lindsay but inspired also by the example of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes in his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), wrote of working-class life and black popular culture as well as his own vagabond experiences n the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.
In his next book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), he turned to the blues for a poetic form derived from and answering to the desires, needs, and aesthetic sensibilities of the black working class. In these poems Hughes also took on working-class personae. Sterling Brown followed Hughes in a similar spirit with ballads and other poetic forms that attempted to catch the spirit of the folk heritage without merely imitating “folk” performance. Other black poets continued to write primarily in traditional English literary forms, at times turning these forms to new uses.
Claude McKay was a Jamaican immigrant and radical socialist who had begun his poetic career with two volumes of verse primarily in Jamaican dialect. But after moving to the United States, he wrote poems exclusively in a standard English dialect and used traditional stanza’s forms, most notably the sonnet. He turned these forms to new uses, with poems of political invective being his most famous (If We Must Die), although he wrote many lyrics of nostalgia for his homeland as well as about love or exile (The Tropics in New York, Harlem Dancer).
The work of McKay, who was an admirer of English Romantics such as Percy Abysses Shelley, blends a romantic sensibility with a race-conscious and at times revolutionary one. Culled also adhered to traditional English poetics, but his work was less politically radical. In poems of love, praise, or racial self-questioning as well as protest, Culled appealed to the sensibilities of the black middle class.
Believing great poetry must transcend racial identity, Culled was not averse to writing on racial subjects-?as he did in his most memorable poems, such as Heritage, Incident, and From the Dark Tower-?but he felt the tradition of poetry in English was a more important resource or the poet than any supposed “racial” heritage. While the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance were men-?Hughes, McKay, Culled-?black women’s poetry was far from incidental to the movement.
Poems by Alice Dunbar Nelson, Helene Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld GrimmГ©, Secondly Bennett, and Anne Spencer appeared frequently in periodicals, although only Georgia Douglas Johnson published full volumes of poetry (including The Heart of a Woman, and Other Poems [1918] and Bronze [1922]). They sought to extricate themselves from stereotypes of hypersensitivity and primitive abandon. Attempting to claim femininity on terms denied them by the dominant society, they worked variously within and against inherited constraints concerning the treatment of love and nature as well as racial experience in poetry.
A significant proportion of poets, as well as other participants in the Harlem Renaissance, were gay or bisexual, including McKay, Culled, Locke, Dunbar Nelson, Richard Bruce Nugent, and perhaps Hughes. References to lesbian sexuality were also well-known in blues songs by Ma Rained and Bessie Smith. The renaissance participated in what one scholar termed “the invention of homosexuality’ in American culture during the early 20th century, when sexual identities came to be defined and policed in new ways.
Drag balls were reported in black newspapers, sometimes disparagingly. In part because of lax policing, Harlem was known as a destination for whites seeking illicit sexual thrills, but it also allowed for discreet liaisons through which long-term same-sex relationships developed both within and between the races. According to some critics, the renaissance was as gay as it was Negro. However, with the exception of Nugent, gay sexuality among the well-known writers and artists was discreet and mostly closeted.
