5.7. The Harlem Renaissance

→ African American literature between WWI and WWII

  • Harlem as center (turned black after 1914)

  • Jazz rooms, dancing, partys but also poverty, segregation, …

  • difficult to find start or end, main part in 1920s

  • renaissance implies rebirth of black culture

  • white patrons, so black could afford life → took infuence

  • Reaction to sending black soldiers to WW I and oppressions

  • Not just literature, also dance, art, …

  • Counters arguments that Black art is not equal

Programmatic ideas - precursors

  • Brooker T. Washington

    • argued for accommodation

    • African Americans should start with agricultural/industrial training → to prove to be able to have success

    • Strategy: accepting segregation to certain point

  • W.E.B. Du Bois

    • more outspoken

    • demanded right to vote, equality and education

    • all are the same, some more talented, need more education

    • segregation as fault of whites

Programmatic ideas - central statement:

Awakening of Black culture, sense of community → fusion of diverse ideas, Commons:

  • not inferior → emancipation

  • share self-image

  • rejects white washing of Black history

  • Blacks as Americans

Text: “The New N****” 1925 by Alain (first essay then extension)

→ Argues:

  • transition from “old” to “new” self-perception

  • New African American is

    • vibrant with new psychology

    • participates actively

  • Change of self-definition

  • self-respect, race pride

  • self-dependence

  • racial unity

  • cultural emancipation (also folk art as equal)

  • rejection of accomodation → full participation

  • African Americans = human beings

  • turn to inner life

But not just positve, issues:

  • reality of life, e.g poverty, racism

  • Patronage by whites

  • Racism, exoticism (othering)

Melodrama “Rachel” 1916 by Angelina Weld Grimké

  • NAACP, campaign against lynching → political act

  • exposes lynching, critiques gender roles and industrial education

  • modernist and African American traits

  • Melodrama influenced African American theater but also other way around

Poetry: claude McKay “If we must die” 1919/22, Langston Hughes “Homesick Blues” 1926

  • 2 very different styles

  • Claude: sonnet, feelings of confinement, but also breaking free

  • Hughes: musical tradition, pride of heritage, steep sadness, burden

Fiction and novels

3 very different forms of writing:

  • Jean Toomer “Cane” 1923 → very modernist, fragmented

  • Nella Larsen “Quicksand”/”Passing” 1928/1929 → particular perspective, to pass for white & be accepted, shows inequality

  • Zora Neale Hurston “Their Eyes Were Watching God” 1937 (anthropological fiction) → fulfills black asthetic (materials, language and technique), feminist

    • Zora Neale Hurston:

      • grew up in Florida in Black community, went to University, studied black lives

      • diversity of interests: fiction/non-fiction, writer/researcher, …

      • Portrayed different facettes which we can learn from

-→ Harlem renaissance:

  • 1 climax of African American literature/arts

  • extremely productive

  • very diverse, influence on different things

  • affirmed black culture

  • Problem e.g. patronage

Summed up in picture “Aspects of N****o Life: Song of the Towers” 1934 by Aaron Douglass

current film productions about Black life during HR

“Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker

  • short series 2020

  • Madam C. J. Walker born Sarah Breedlove 1867-1919

  • series based on biography “On her own ground” 2001 written by her great granddaughter

  • from child servant to business woman and activist

“Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 2020

  • about Blues singer Ma Rainey (mother of Blues)

  • based on play by August Wilson 1982