The Harlem or “New Negro” Renaissance is now one hundred years old. To be sure, such a centenary is necessarily approximate, since no one can agree exactly when this pivotal Black American cultural movement began. Its inception may have been in 1919, when the triumphant Harlem Hellfighters marched up Fifth Avenue, or, alternatively, 1920, the year of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. Then again, the Renaissance might have commenced with the popular success of the first all-African American musical, Shuffle Along, in 1921. Indeed, some purists will suggest that it is still too early to be proclaiming a century of the Renaissance—until, that is, we are a full hundred years removed from the 1924 Civic Club Dinner (organized by Opportunity magazine) that publicly celebrated an emerging generation of proudly African American writers and artists. Others might argue that we should pause still further, until the hundredth anniversary of Alain Locke’s The New Negro anthology in 2025. Regardless of such uncertainty about the movement’s birthday, what is abundantly clear is that the origins of the Harlem Renaissance now precede the memory of virtually anyone living today, thus rendering it—particularly from the vantage point of our radically accelerated culture—indubitably historical.If the Harlem Renaissance is unquestionably a remote epoch, critical scholarship about the movement has itself now become officially vintage. David Levering Lewis’s influential When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981) is four decades old and Nathan Irvin Huggins’s pioneering study, Harlem Renaissance (1971), has reached its fiftieth birthday. Writing when the Renaissance was more than just a series of historically distant textual traces, Huggins even had the enviable luxury of being able to call upon no less an artist than Aaron Douglass—the avatar of Renaissance graphic designers in the 1920s—to provide an original and striking art-deco cover image for his book.Five decades later, the appearance of Archibald Motley’s famous 1934 painting Black Belt as the cover image of Cambridge’s new A History of the Harlem Renaissance risks seeming not so much gloriously iconic as all-too-familiar, so ubiquitous has that particular work of art become as a visual encapsulation of interwar African American culture. Indeed, the cover of Cambridge’s previous critical anthology about the Renaissance—edited by George Hutchinson in 2007—also now cannot help but seem slightly formulaic for its use of that other seemingly omnipresent Motley work, Blues (1929). The fact that Motley’s paintings have, in the twenty-first century, become such a pervasive and even commonplace visual shorthand for the Renaissance reflects the inevitable challenge awaiting any contemporary scholar of Black modernism: how—a full fifty years after Nathan Huggins, but not even fifteen since the previous Cambridge edited collection about the Renaissance—might one reasonably say something genuinely fresh, vital, and illuminating about such a well-worn subject?Yet, if soliciting original art from the now-long-deceased Douglass or Motley was simply not an option for editors Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert in 2021, they and their twenty contributors do have the advantage of the kind of broad and nuanced perspective that only hindsight can provide. The most dated and limited aspect of Huggins’s magisterial Harlem Renaissance, after all, is its trenchant evaluation of the movement’s limitations and failures, and, in particular, what the author called its racial or ethnic “provincialism” (197, 208). In contrast, A History of the Harlem Renaissance is alive to the multitudinous aspects, myriad achievements, and global dimensions of African American cultural production between the world wars.However substantial the differences between Huggins’s seminal book and this compelling new collection, and however distant they may be from each other historically, there are, nonetheless, unsettling but revealing parallels between their respective cultural contexts. Each appeared in the wake of seeming advances for people of color in America, but at what was also, in each case, a moment of dispiriting retreat and reaction. The gains of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s—epitomized by the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act—clearly spurred Harlem Renaissance, but that book also arrived in an America that was still reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and mired in Richard Nixon’s dog-whistle appeals to a conservative “silent majority” and a callous policy of so-called “benign neglect” toward Black Americans. The racial context of today is potentially even bleaker. Contrary to idealistic forecasts, the Obama presidency did not catapult us into a “postracial society” after all, and it ultimately was not as inspirational as “I have a dream,” as radical as “Plymouth Rock landed on us,” or as politically vital as the Voting Rights Act (which the Supreme Court even gutted during the administration of our first Black Chief Executive). What is more, the racial setbacks of the 1970s now seem almost tame in comparison to the shrill denunciations of Critical Race Theory, the zealous demonization of the Black Lives Matter campaign, and the increasingly overt, outlandish, and violent expressions of white supremacy that currently permeate our fractured nation. Yet, while parallel contexts inform Harlem Renaissance and A History of the Harlem Renaissance, there is a fundamental dissimilarity between Huggins’s palpable disappointment about what the earlier cultural movement could not and did not achieve, and the rather more hopeful and celebratory account of the Renaissance’s aspirations, attainments, and long-reaching, wide-ranging cultural influence in this valuable new study.In short, this is not your grandfather’s Harlem Renaissance. As the editors put it in their introduction, this project emphasizes “the eclecticism and variety” of the movement, not just in literature, but also in “visual culture, popular culture, music, dance, and politics,” “going beyond well-known genres,” and “revising conventional assumptions about the period, such as location, time period, and terminology” (10). In addition, then, to such conventional foci as novels, poetry, short fiction, and essays, the contributors of A History of the Harlem Renaissance address a range of forms and media, including magazine illustrations, theatrical pageants, and school plays. The two chapters on Zora Neale Hurston, meanwhile, barely mention her epochal but much-analyzed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, turning instead to the author’s early plays and short ethnographic documentary films. There are, in fact, more references to such periodicals as The Crisis, Messenger, Opportunity, Fire!!, and The Brownies’ Book in this collection than to such literary evergreens as Passing and Color. Indeed, conventionally canonical figures like Nella Larsen and Countee Cullen, though fleetingly present, are relatively marginal to A History of the Harlem Renaissance. In their place, several authors and artists who have rarely featured prominently (or at all) in previous accounts of the movement step up to center stage to join the customary main cast of Hurston, Locke, Du Bois, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Carter G. Woodson, and Jean Toomer. Among these hitherto neglected bards are poets Virginia Spencer and Mae V. Cowdery, writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent, and Eslanda Goode Robeson, biographer, manager, and spouse of legendary singer/actor Paul. Essays in this collection also sometimes move beyond the Renaissance itself to acknowledge its later cultural legacy, such as in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems of the 1960s and 1970s and the twenty-first-century graphic narrative Incognegro. And, inevitably, there is a particular concern with the transnational implications and global contexts of the Renaissance, most evidently in an excellent chapter on “Radical Black Internationalism,” as well as consistent attention to the Caribbean throughout. In fact, one of the singular aspects of this book is its distinctively transatlantic perspective and accent, resulting from the fact that almost half its contributors hail from overseas or are based outside of the United States, primarily in the United Kingdom. At every turn and in every way, then, A History of the Harlem Renaissance invites and inspires readers to reconceive and reimagine both the nature and the extent of Black modernist cultural production.It is this eclectic and encyclopedic imperative that most vividly distinguishes A History of the Harlem Renaissance from 2007’s The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance—a recent predecessor from the same press, but one with which it shares only two contributors. The Companion, after all, emerged very soon after the “transnational turn” in American literary studies, and before the widespread consolidation of the “New Modernist Studies.” Unsurprisingly, then, that collection’s focus is almost exclusively literary and canonical, and its treatment of the Renaissance as a global phenomenon, while undeniably pioneering, is necessarily provisional and tentative. As such, the 2007 Companion remains an illuminating anthology, poised between the critical emphases of the late twentieth century and the emerging academic paradigms of the twenty-first century. It is at once both a sharply defined survey of the pantheon of the Harlem Renaissance as we knew it and an intriguing glimpse of a different Harlem Renaissance that an emerging generation of scholars was beginning to outline and explore. A History of the Harlem Renaissance operates almost as a necessary and very welcome sequel to that book: a showcase of how new critical assumptions and approaches have flourished and continue to flourish as we enter the third decade of this century. As in any anthology, of course, some chapters stand out from the crowd, with the discussions of “Cultural Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Harlem Renaissance” and “The Bildungsroman in the Harlem Renaissance” being particularly notable. Beyond qualitative distinctions, however, these twenty essays (plus an introduction and Afterword) collectively constitute an indispensable guide to the current state-of-the-field of Harlem Renaissance studies.Just as A History of the Harlem Renaissance boasts all the strengths of the New Modernist Studies and other current scholarly approaches, however, it also cannot help but reflect some of the inherent limitations of contemporary criticism. This collection’s vision—like those of other present cutting-edge anthologies—is so ambitiously all-embracing that it sometimes seems to lack either focus or a center. It is less a “history” (which implies a clear narrative through line) than a dazzling kaleidoscope. Its unswerving commitment to unearthing previously neglected texts, media, and artists means that its purview can also seem exhaustively comprehensive or indiscriminately wide-ranging. Having transcended narrow canons and rigid disciplinary boundaries, all of us in the 2020s are in danger of drowning in an embarrassment of textual and extratextual riches, including a multitude of previously unfamiliar materials—whether long-unpublished works finally seeing the light of day or an array of historical and archival sources now conveniently and instantly downloadable.Perhaps inevitably, then—and for all its many virtues—A History of the Harlem Renaissance ultimately risks being both too much and not enough. Despite its vaunted eclecticism, transcendence of conventional borders or categories, and refusal to be restricted by traditional literary canons or anchors, this collection is also surprisingly consistent in its seemingly narrow privileging of Jazz-Age Harlem, the printed text, and/or writers. The emphasis throughout is squarely upon authors and artists who came to prominence during the “Negro Vogue” of the 1920s, even though historians often now suggest that the 1930s constituted a crucial later phase of the Harlem Renaissance. What is more, scholars today often argue for the more open and encompassing term “New Negro Renaissance” over the geographically specific “Harlem Renaissance,” and even those of us who retain the conventional nomenclature increasingly use it as a serviceable umbrella term for a wide range of African American modernist culture. There is, however, very little acknowledgment in these pages of, say, the Chicago Black Renaissance or any at all of the achievements of southern Black musicians in the Mississippi Delta. Even discussions of nonliterary forms and media in this book tend to have a distinctly literary slant. The chapter on African American music, for example, specifically explores what such literati as Locke, Hurston, and Claude McKay made of jazz, spirituals and blues, instead of addressing the music itself. Even a subsequent chapter dedicated to jazz—one of the few essays in the collection not oriented to print media—tends to suggest diligent research by a literary scholar rather than the deep immersion and expertise of a musicologist.A more fully interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary survey of Black modernism and the “New Negro” renaissance might valuably recruit a larger proportion of contributors from a greater range of scholarly fields in order to highlight both areas and individuals that still remain marginal in, or absent from, A History of the Harlem Renaissance. There are numerous figures in literature, “visual culture, popular culture, music, dance, and politics” who are as significant as any of the writers that dominate the pages of this current collection, but who warrant only passing mention or, in many cases, none at all. To name just a handful of such contenders: choreographer Katherine Dunham; country blues singer-songwriter Robert Johnson; Chicago-based author Margaret Walker; the most popular and celebrated Black celebrity of the 1930s, boxer Joe Louis; singer, actress, and crossover Broadway star, Ethel Waters; pioneering interwar film director Oscar Micheaux; the first elected Black woman state legislator, Crystal Bird Fauset; composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams; and, indeed, Chicago painter Archibald Motley, whose art may adorn the cover of A History of the Harlem Renaissance but who barely appears in the text. There is, in short, still evident potential for a broader, richer, and more diverse reimagining of African American modernism.Of course, no single anthology can achieve or should be expected to achieve everything, which is why Deborah E. McDowell’s Afterword asserts both the importance of this collection and the imperative for further studies of the Renaissance: “Yes, we do need another volume and, yes, there is plenty left to say” (378). The very presence of this Afterword also quietly acknowledges and seeks to mitigate a thorny and ongoing problem: the fact that our professoriate, even in the field of African American studies, remains painfully dominated by white voices. Even as this collection illuminates anew the groundbreaking historical accomplishments of Black artists in the face of white supremacist traditions, it reflects—and implicitly reflects upon—how much remains to be done. Appropriately, then, even if a majority of its contributors may be white—as is the case with almost all academic anthologies—A History of the Harlem Renaissance is deliberately and resonantly framed by two exceptional Black women scholars. Its dedicatee is the late Cheryl Wall, author of the groundbreaking Women of the Harlem Renaissance, while McDowell’s judicious survey of the forgoing contents—a wonderfully self-reflexive epilogue that is as incisive a review of this book as anyone could wish—is one of its highlights.
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Open Access
Dec 12, 2023
Ebtihal Elshaikh 