Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem (New Negro) Renaissance was an African-American cultural movement between the World War I (1914–1919) and World War II (1939–1945) that saw a flourishing of black literature, drama, dance, art, and music. Shaped by a multiplicity of beliefs and motives, the Harlem Renaissance was a complex and often contradictory movement that was unified by a shared sense of racial self-determination and self-definition. With institutional support from black journals such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis and the Urban League's Opportunity and white philanthropists and publishing houses, the Renaissance encouraged literary and artistic works that would reshape notions of blackness in American popular consciousness and counter dominant stereotypes of black inferiority.

A MIDDLE-CLASS MOVEMENT

Harlem Renaissance leaders envisioned an educated, middle-class cultural vanguard that would lead the race in the twentieth century and bring about social change. The most exceptional and educated fraction of the race, those the black national leader W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) called the Talented Tenth, were called upon to set an example for the rest of the race by producing morally and racially validating art and demonstrating high cultural achievement to the rest of the nation. This vision of the movement privileged middle-class norms and advocated a politics of respectability that insisted on positive representations of black life: exemplary racial characters who exhibited middle-class aspirations and proper sexual and gender comportment. Yet at the same time, this guiding ideology was constantly challenged by writers who produced literature that reflected the experiences and values of the black working classes and those others left out of the talented tenth's normalizing program, including sexual and gender dissidents. The Harlem Renaissance thus constituted a field where the very meanings of blackness were contested in the literary public sphere.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Most of the prominent women writers of the Renaissance came from the educated middle classes, and their literature reflected their worldview. Jessie Redmon Fauset, for example, published a number of poems, essays, and novels during the Renaissance. Each of her four novels (There is Confusion, 1924; Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, 1929; The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life, 1931; and Comedy: American Style, 1933) depicts professional men and women of Negro society as they struggle against race prejudice. Highly conventional in style, they primarily advanced the politics of respectability and substantiated middle-class values. The novelist Nella Larsen similarly set her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), in the environments of the educated black elite, though her depictions are more critical of normative constructions of gender, race, and class than are Fauset's. Focusing more on self-alienation than on self-determination, Larsen's novels draw from the author's experiences as a biracial woman to explore how the color line limited black women's subjectivities. The poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson was the only woman poet of the movement to publish her own poetry collections (The Hearts of a Woman and Other Poems, 1918; Bronze: A Collection of Verse, 1922; and An Autumn Love Cycle, 1928). The role of women in the literary public sphere was expanded by a number of other poets, playwrights, and short story writers, including Marita O. Bonner, Anne Spenser, Helene Johnson Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Angelina Weld Grimké.

In addition to their literary work, many of those women played a central role in shaping the direction of the Harlem Renaissance. As the literary editor of Crisis magazine, Fauset was an important mentor to aspiring writers. Georgia Douglas Johnson also mentored new writers and hosted a well-known literary salon at her Washington, DC, home that provided creative support and literary networking between Harlem and Washington. The poet Gwendolyn Bennett's regular column in Opportunity, "Ebony Flute," chronicled and publicized the literary works of younger writers. Through such contributions middle-class women were able to influence emerging work and guide the Renaissance to reflect the values of the Talented Tenth. Although their literary works often enforced racialized class, gender, and sexual norms, they also challenged existing stereotypes by enunciating the experiences and desires of a black economic and social class that rarely was represented in popular or literary culture.

CHALLENGES TO MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES

A number of other artists challenged those racial, sexual, and gender norms in their work and repudiated the elitism of the Talented Tenth. Drawing from blues culture, folk culture, and black working-class culture, writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent were praised for their racial consciousness, but their refusal to affirm the values of the black middle-class and the patriarchal order of family in their prose and poetry—not to mention their personal lives—earned them dissaprobation and criticism. Hurston, one of the most significant artists of the movement, took up the practices of the rural folk rather than the black bourgeoisie, in her writings. A novelist, essayist, dramatist, and anthropologist, Hurston spent much of the Renaissance years traveling through the South, Haiti, and Jamaica, documenting folk cultures. In addition to numerous stories and plays, she published two collections of folk tales (Mules and Men, 1935; Tell My Horse, 1938), several novels (including Jonah's Vine Gourd, 1934, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937), and an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road, 1942). Writers such as McKay, Thurman, and Nugent, meanwhile, all wrote works with significant queer content that explored the less respectable terrain of the urban underworld.

Although the individual poems, novels, and short stories of those writers articulated new possibilities of black masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in the public sphere, their collective rebellion of this other Harlem Renaissance can be seen best in the avant-garde literary journal Fire!! (1926), which was edited collaboratively by Thurman, Hughes, Nugent, Hurston, Bennett, Aaron Douglas, and John Davis. Fire!! offered a counterpoint to the literary politics espoused by magazines such as Crisis and Opportunity. Although only one issue was published, it included fiction about prostitution, internalized color prejudice, and homosexuality and poetic and prose explorations of folk and blues culture. The importance of blues and jazz to those writers requires that they be considered in relation to blues performers such as Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters. In songs about extramarital relationships, domestic disillusionment, bisexuality and lesbian relations, and women's social oppression, blues performers articulated working-class black women's experiences and enunciated queer possibilities.

Many of the contributions of women and sexual minorities to the Harlem Renaissance were overlooked, minimized, or forgotten in the decades after the movement. The recovery of those histories, begun in the 1970s by black feminist scholars and writers, continues to be performed. For example, lesbian feminist critics have read queer meanings in the works of women authors such as Grimké and Larsen, and Hughes's poetry has been taken up by queer critics to explore the construction of black sexuality. Similarly, as films such as the black British filmmaker Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1989) and the African-American filmmaker Rodney Evans's Brother to Brother (2004) demonstrate, the Harlem Renaissance remains an important resource for cotemporary queer of color history and identity formation in the United States and Europe.

see also Blues; Gender Identity; Jazz; Literature: I. Overview; Masculinity: I. Overview.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garber, Eric. 1989. "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem." In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. New York: New American Library.

Hull, Gloria T. 1987. Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hutchinson, George. 1995. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Lewis, David Levering. 1997. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin.

Nugent, Richard Bruce. 2002. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth. Durham: Duke University Press.

Patton, Venetria K., and Maureen Honey, eds. 2001. Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Schwartz, A. B. Christa. 2003. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wall, Cheryl A. 1995. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Watson, Steven. 1995. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930. New York: Pantheon.

                                              Shane Vogel