Harlem Renaissance Overview In the context of the postwar and reconstruction period of the United States, the Harlem Renaissance stands out as the dominant cultural revolution for Black Americans of the time and helped to establish Black intellectualism as a force worthy of recognition by the broader US public. Writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and… Continue reading Final Overview Draft
Harlem Semester Project Proposal At the start of this semester, I was thinking that I wanted to focus on artwork in this class, specifically the paintings of Jacob Lawrence. Going into this class I knew that the Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement, but I also had a vague idea that there was an… Continue reading Final Blog Site Proposal
My main takeaway from our class walking tour of Harlem was how much history took place in just the few blocks that we walked around on. Starting from the Schomburg Center and walking a few blocks uptown, and then heading west to Frederick Douglass Boulevard (8th Ave) before circling back down 135th, we passed multiple… Continue reading This Is Harlem
I think that classes like ours make the case for Black Digital Humanities studies by themselves. I had to look up what digital humanities actually means, and when I did it’s basically exactly what we are doing in this class: using digital archives to read old literature, plays, essays and stories that give us a… Continue reading 4/26 Hot Take: The Case For Black Digital Humanities
Blog Post 5 I really enjoyed reading “How It Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, an essay in which she dives into her identity as a Black woman and the role that her childhood and upbringing played in shaping that identity. I knew for this blog post that I wanted to… Continue reading How It Felt to be Colored Zora
There is a quote on page 90 of the novel passing that gives me a different impression of Clare Kendry’s sense of self and her passing as a white woman: “No, Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.” To me, this implies that Clare was indifferent to her blackness. Like,… Continue reading Clare Kendry in Passing (Novel)
One of the differences that stood out to me between the film and reading the first part of Passing was the presence of Gertrude when Irene first meets Claire’s husband. The husband looks so stupid being in a room with 3 women, one of whom is his wife, and being crazy racist not realizing that… Continue reading The Encounter
Watching Passing on Netflix reminded me of a reverse passing situation that got a lot of attention a few years ago, when a white woman named Rachel Dolezal was pretending to have both African American and Native American heritage while working as the president of a branch of the NAACP. I’m not sure why… Continue reading Passing
Blog #3 When looking through the archived Opportunity magazine, one of the things that jumped out to me was an image that we have seen in another reading that we have been looking at. At the end of Alain Locke’s essay “Enter the New Negro” in Survey Graphic, there is a drawn portrait of… Continue reading Creativity of the Harlem Renaissance
Blog Post 2 Final Draft What does imaginative or fictive work do versus nonfiction? I think that both fiction and nonfiction works (and pictures) can provide us with great insights into the times and the places that they are depicting, and they both offer us unique ways of interpreting the information being given to us.… Continue reading The Harlem of Imagination and the Harlem of Memory