Symbolic Space, Communal Rituals, and The Surreality of The Urban Ghetto: Harlem in Black Literature From The 1920s to The 1960s

Abstract

Since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, black literature of the city has been intensely debated and often judged by mistaken standards. Have black writers more or less failed to reflect the urban experience of the common black people and sadly lagged behind social scientists or political activists in their efforts to understand the social and cultural changes brought about by black Americans' large-scale exposure to an urbanized and industrialized modern since the Great Migration of the 1910s and the formation and later deterioration of the urban ghettoes? Have they betrayed the brutal reality and indulged in exotic worlds of the imagination? Or has black literature helped in unique way to communicate, dramatize, and orchestrate the collective quest for cultural and communal identity of the black minority of the cities? Which literary strategies did black writers develop in order to create images, sounds, rhythms, and visions of new black urban culture and community; which of words achieving form did they work out for expressing a naked whose reality was hitherto unimaginable? How did these literary strategies or patterns change in response to the transformation of Harlem from the Negro capital of the world of the 1920s to the ghetto on the edge of hell of the 1950s and 1960s? And, more generally, how can we as critics adequately grasp the complex, often contradictory interrelationship of society, community, culture, and literature, and deor reconstruct it in our interpretation of literary texts?