THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

1. THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

2. 2 The Harlem District In 1920s - the center of Black art and life A series of immigrant settlers but after WWI became the Black capital 117, 000 whites left Harlem as 87, 000 blacks moved in An extraordinarily rich cultural tradition: indigenous American musical and literary forms as ragtime and jazz, poetry and prose

3. 3 Socio-cultural background A massive social movement Internal migration: from the rural South to the industrial North: the percentage of blacks living outside the South rose from approximately 10 per cent in 1915 to 25 percent in 1940 Segregation, the high tide of a reign of terror in the South, the failure of the post-Reconstruction America

4. 4 Black Engines of Public Opinion and Change The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) Crisis Magazine edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, one of the major sources for the dissemination of writings by African Americans

5. 5 Black Engines of Public Opinion and Change The National Urban League: Opportunity, a sociology journal, edited by Charles S. Johnson The Universal Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garvey

6. 6 White Engines of Public Opinion and Change Carl Van Doren�s Century magazine Much faith in the black writers �What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are."

7. 7 Periodization A decade of fairly clear communal and nationalist assertion for the African Americans Nathan Irvin Huggins (1971) starts with the year 1914 The same year is given by Jervis Andersen in This Was Harlem - 1900-1950 (1981) 1914 the year when St. James Presbyterian Church�s black congregation moved their church to Harlem

8. 8 Beginnings David Levering Lewis, in When Harlem was in Vogue, puts the beginning in 1919 when the Black Regiment of the New York National Guard triumphantly returned from the War.

9. 9 Beginnings Huston A. Baker, Jr. in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) conceives of the period as the climax of the strategy employed by Booker T. Washington in his address before the Atlantic Exposition on September 1895

10. 10 Duration The traditional view confines the Harlem Renaissance to the African-American works published between 1923 and 1929 For Robert Stepto, in Columbia Literary History of the USA, it is unthinkable to exclude Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks from the list of the Harlem Renaissance writers

11. 11 Members �The Talented Tenth�: Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neal Hurston Other women writers: Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker Other names: Arna Bontemps, Sterling A. Brown, George Samuel Schuyler and Richard Wright

12. 12 Name The Harlem Renaissance The Modern Negro Renaissance The New Negro Renaissance: The New Negro: An Interpretation, 1925, Alain Locke: the image of the New Negro - full of a new spirit, renewed self-respect and self-dependence, who in fact was the Old Negro but exhibiting now his concealed self and thwarted potentialities

13. 13 �The New Negro� The new Negro repudiated the fathers, who had achieved the stability, comfort, and the literacy of the middle class. He adopted a view of racial solidarity turning towards the lower class to find inspiration and material, to the anonymous, alienated, untutored 90 percent, living as sharecroppers �down home� or in the slums of the big cities.

14. 14 Alain Locke: �The New Negro� �For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most under-valued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well.

15. 15 Alain Locke: �The New Negro� �The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but ... a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source.

16. 16 Alain Locke: �The New Negro� A second crop of the Negro's gift promises still more largely. He now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization.

17. 17 Alain Locke: �The New Negro� ... And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least... celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with a spiritual Coming of Age.�

18. 18 African Heritage The modernist preoccupation with �primitive� models of African origin The image of Africa and the values of authenticity and freedom from inhibition

19. 19 African Heritage Marcus Garvey�s UNIA posited Africa as the spiritual home of the blacks Advocated a back-to-Africa policy Political expression of the artistic preoccupation with �primitive� cultural sources

20. 20 Black Art and Culture Identification with the spirit of jazz Jazz can explain the whole black art Just like jazz, it seems unthought out, unintellectual, creating the impression that it is done on the spot

21. 21 Jazz in the Harlem Renaissance Both the jazz musician and the writer do work hard to make their art appear so effortless The innovative use of jazz: the play with different literary forms in fiction and mainly in poetry to express black culture Distinctly expressed in the poems of L. Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen

22. 22 Jazz in the Harlem Renaissance The spirituals, blues and jazz became the basis of poetic expression Hughes entitled his first collection of poems published in 1925 The Weary Blues

23. 23 Jazz in Harlem Jazz authorized: - distrust of rationalism - celebration of sensuality - separateness from conventional society - belief in improvisation and authenticity of feeling The ideology not only of blacks but of whites