Research Guide: Harlem Renaissance: Home

Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide information about the people, places, events, and cultural expressions of the Harlem Renaissance, covering a period that ranges from 1917 to 1935.

This volume provides new historical and literary insights into the Harlem Renaissance, returning attention to it not only as a broad expression of artistic work but also as a movement that found catharsis in art and hope in resistance.
By examining such major figures of the era as Jessie Fauset, Paul Robeson, and Zora Neale Hurston, the contributors reframe our understanding of the interplay of art, politics, culture, and society in 1920s Harlem. The fourteen essays explore the meaning and power of Harlem theater, literature, and art during the period; probe how understanding of racial, provincial, and gender identities originated and evolved; and reexamine the sociopolitical contexts of this extraordinary black creative class. Delving into these topics anew, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited reconsiders the national and international connections of the movement and how it challenged cliched interpretations of sexuality, gender, race, and class. The contributors show how those who played an integral role in shattering stereotypes about black creativity pointed the way toward real freedom in the United States, in turn sowing some of the seeds of the Black Power movement.
A fascinating chapter in the history of the African American experience and New York City, the cultural flowering of the Harlem Renaissance reverberates today. This thought-provoking combination of social history and intellectual art criticism opens this powerful moment in history to renewed and dynamic interpretation and sharper discussion.

Examines black masculinity in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, using African American published texts, American archives and unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, focusing on prominent figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture.

Discusses how African American authors reacted to the Jim Crow system with migration narratives, poetry about the African American experience, and more, and looks at the legacy of writers and artists between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance.

During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American culture flourished. The period gave birth to numerous significant and enduring creative works that were at once American and emblematic of the black experience in particular. It was a time when African-American culture became more distinct from American culture in general, though it also continued to be a part of America's larger cultural heritage. While the writers, artists, and intellectuals who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance recognized that they had much in common, they also sought to distinguish themselves from one another. This book approaches the achievement of the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of the conflict between individual and group identity.

It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson's analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro--any more than the growing sense of "Negro" national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.

A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.