Harlem Renaissance

1
Harlem Renaissance

• Featuring
• Jean Toomer
• Langston Hughes
• Nella Larsen
• Zora Neal Hurston

2
The Harlem Renaissance

• African American cultural movement of the 1920s
  and early 1930s centered around Harlem
• Arts
• Literature
• Visual Art
• Music

Grocery store, Harlem, 1940 Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Washington, D.C. LC-USZC4-4737
3
Renaissance Firsts

• Mainstream publishers and critics took African
  American literature seriously
• African American arts attracted significant
  attention from the nation at large
• African American artists and writers used culture
  to work for the goals of civil rights and
  equality
• African American writers intended to express
  themselves freely, no matter what the public
  thought

4
Great Migration

• Hundreds of thousands of African Americans
  moved from the rural South to the industrial
  cities of the North.

5
Push of Great Migration

• Poor employment conditions and prospects in the
  South
• Southern racism, e.g. discrimination and fear of
  racial violence
• No opportunities for political representation
• Poor education no future for children

6
Pull of Great Migration

• Better employment prospects and wages in the
  North
• Better education and possibility of using the
  vote
• Better life for future generations
• Reunification of family
• Freedom and modernity

7
Groundwork of Movement

• Increased education and employment opportunities
  following World War I led to the development of
  an African American middle class.
• As more and more educated and socially conscious
  African Americans settled in New Yorks
  neighborhood of Harlem, it developed into the
  political and cultural center of black America.

8
Harlem Renaissance

• African American literature and arts surged in
  the early 1900s.
• Jazz and blues music moved with the African
  American populations from the South and Midwest
  into the bars and cabarets of Harlem.
• This generation of African Americans artists,
  writers, and performers refused to let the
  reality of racism and discrimination in the
  United States keep them from pursuing their
  goals.

9
Fire!

• Autumn, 1926, Fire!, a new African American
  literary magazine
• Opportunity for new group of African American
  writers

10
Renaissance Traits

• No common literary style or political ideology
• Unity in
• Sense of taking part in a common endeavor
• Commitment to giving artistic expression to
  African American experience

11
Some Additional Features

• artistic activity (intellectuals, writers, poets,
  musicians, dancers, painters and photographers)
• supported by white philanthropists, critics, and
  consumers of black culture
• promoted by black papers (Du Bois The Crisis and
  others) through prizes and literary salons

12
Common Themes

• Roots of African American experience in Africa
  and the American South
• Social consciousness
• Racial consciousness
• Desire for political and social equality
• Duality

13
Characteristics

• Most characteristic aspect of the Harlem
  Renaissance the diversity of its expression
• Breadth and scope tremendous
• From mid-1920s to mid-1930s, about 16 African
  American writers published over 50 volumes of
  poetry and fiction
• Dozens of African American artists made mark in
  painting, music, and theater

14
Literary Diversity

• Langston Hughess weaving of the rhythms of
  African American music into his poems of ghetto
  life, as in The Weary Blues (1926)

Langston Hughes Library of Congress, Prints
Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection,
reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF34-9058-C
15
More Literary Diversity

• Zora Neale Hurstons novels, such as Their Eyes
  Were Watching God (1937).
• Hurston used life of rural South to create a
  study of race and gender in which a woman finds
  her true identity.

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston Library of
Congress, Prints Photographs Division, Carl Van
Vechten Collection, reproduction number, e.g.,
LC-USZ62-54231
16
Diversity in Performing Arts

• Blues by such people as Bessie Smith
• Jazz by such people as Duke Ellington

Portrait of Bessie Smith holding feathers
Library of Congress, Prints Photographs
Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection,
reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231
17
Jazz Beginnings

• Jazz styles ranged from the combination of blues
  and ragtime by pianist Jelly Role Morton to the
  instrumentation of bandleader Louis Armstrong and
  the orchestration of composer Duke Ellington.

New York, New York. Duke Ellington's trumpet
section Library of Congress, Prints
Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection,
reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF34-9058-C
18
Harlem Renaissance

• Opened the door for many African American authors
  to mainstream white periodicals and publishing
  houses
• Harlems cabarets attracted both Harlem residents
  and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem
  nightlife
• Harlems famous Cotton Club an extreme, providing
  African American entertainment for exclusively
  white audiences

19
Eventual Decline

• Great Depression
• a shift from art to economic and social
  issues

20
Reasons for Decline

• African American writers and literary promoters,
  including Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson,
  and W.E.B. Du Bois, left New York City in the
  early 1930s.
• Final blow when a riot broke out in Harlem in
  1935.
• Set off, in part, by economic hardship of
  Depression
• Also growing tension between African American
  community and white shop owners in Harlem

21
Last Days

• Renaissance did not end overnight
• Almost one-third of the books published during
  the Renaissance appeared after 1929.
• The Harlem Renaissance permanently altered the
  dynamics of African American art and literature
  in the United States.

22
Post-Renaissance

• Large amount of literature from the Renaissance
  inspired writers such as Ralph Ellison and
  Richard Wright in the late 1930s and 1940s

New York, New York. Portrait of Richard Wright,
poet Library of Congress, Prints Photographs
Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction
number, e.g., LC-USF34-9058-C
23
Renaissance Influence

• American publishers and the American public more
  open to African American literature than at the
  beginning of the twentieth century
• Outpouring of African American literature in the
  1980s and 1990s by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison,
  and Spike Lee had roots in the Harlem Renaissance

24
Jean Toomer 1894-1967

• Attended college for four years/never earned a
  degree
• Writer/ poet
• A seeker
• Writer of the most lauded piece of the
  Renaissance
• Spiritualist/Quaker
• Refused label

25
Toomer

• Raised in a predominantly black community and
  attended black high schools.
• Passed for white during certain periods of his
  life
• Used Southern roots in Cane

26
Spiritual Seeker

• In the early twenties, Toomer became interested
  in Unitism, a religion founded by the Armenian
  George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
• The doctrine taught unity, transcendence and
  mastery of self through yoga

27
Charles S. Johnson on Cane

• "Here was triumphantly the Negro artist, detached
  from propaganda, sensitive only to beauty. Where
  Paul Laurence Dunbar gave to the unnamed Negro
  peasant a reassuring touch of humanity, Toomer
  gave to the peasant a passionate charm.... More
  than artist, he was an experimentalist, and this
  last quality has carried him away from what was,
  perhaps, the most astonishingly brilliant
  beginning of any Negro writer of this generation."

28
Arna Bonetemps on Cane

• Cane, the book that provoked this comment, was
  published in 1923 after portions of it had
  appeared earlier in Broom, The Crisis, Double
  Dealer, Liberator, Little Review, Modern Review,
  Nomad, Prairie and S 4 N.
• But Cane and its author, let it be said at once,
  presented an enigma from the start-an enigma
  which has, in many ways, deepened in the years
  since its publication. Given such a problem,
  perhaps one may be excused for not wishing to
  separate completely the man from his work.

29
Toomers Autobiography I

• Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure)
  seven blood mixtures French, Dutch, Welsh,
  Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of
  these, my position in America has been a curious
  one. I have lived equally amid the two race
  groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point
  of view I am naturally and inevitably an
  American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion
  analogous to the fact of racial intermingling.

30
Toomers Biography II

• Neither the universities of Wisconsin or New
  York gave me what I wanted, so I quit them. Just
  how I finally found my stride in writing, is
  difficult to lay hold of. It has been pushing
  through for the past four years. For two years,
  now, I have been in solitude here in Washington.
  It may be begging hunger to say that I am staking
  my living on my work. So be it. The mould is
  cast, and I cannot turn back even if I would.

31
Langston Hughes, 1902-1967

• Novelist
• Playwright
• Poet
• Essayist
• Socialist/Communist sympathizer

32
Hughes Focus

• Common Black people
• Infusion of music (blues, jazz, spirituals)
• Shared memory
• Racial pride/confusion
• Rediscovery of Africa
• Two-ness of Du Bois

33
Influences

• Jazz
• Poets
• Paul Lawrence Dunbar
• Carl Sandburg
• Walt Whitman

34
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

• Mother Danish. Father West Indian
• Attended Fisk University in Nashville, TN
  (1909-1910)
• Continued education at University of Copenhagen
  (1910-1912)
• Studied nursing at Lincoln Hospital in New York
  City (1912-1915)

35
Suddenly, the orchestra blared into something
wild and impressionistic, with a primitive
staccato understrain of Jazz. . . The crowd
stirred, broke, coalesced into twos, and became a
whirling mass.
36
Quicksand (1928)

• Home and belonging
• Past, present and future
• Theme of double consciousness
• Free indirect discourse
• Helgas sexuality and power
• Performing identity vs. established identity

37
Zora Neale Hurston

• Wrote stories, novels, anthropological folklore
  and and an autobiography
• Died in 1960, a forgotten writer, but her work
  has since increased in popularity and critical
  acclaim
• The first great African-American woman writer

38
Beginnings

• Born in Notasulga, AL grew up in Eatonville, FL
• Father a Baptist preacher not a family man
• Never finished grade school
• After attending Howard University, studied
  anthropology at Barnard (part of Columbia),
  graduating in 1928
• Lived in NYC during the heyday of the 1920s

39
Folklore

• Returned to the South in late 1920s to study
  folklore, collecting stories, songs, folktales.
• Found patron, Mrs. Osgood Mason, an exacting
  woman who inspected Hurstons work prior to
  submission for publication

40
Chief Works

• Mules and Men (1935)
• Tell My Horse (1938)
• Jonahs Gourd Vine (1934)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• One of the most important American novels of the
  first half of the 20th century
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

41
Mules and Men

• Classified as folklore
• Explores self, voice, and community
• Describes search for authentic spells, and her
  fascination with the voodoo religion in New
  Orleans
• Relation of knowledge of the self and knowledge
  of the folk

42
Anthropological Themes

• Dialect
• A folklorist who accurately reported local
  dialects
• Common folk
• Wrote of poor and uneducated
• Religion
• Fascinated by centrality of religion to poor
  African Americans
• Feminism

43
An Idealist?

• Mama exhorted her children at every
  opportunity to jump at de sun. We might not
  land on the sun, but at least we would get off
  the ground.