Title: Queer Reality and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance
My final project will center around expressions of sexuality, specifically queer sexuality in the period of the Harlem Renaissance. I will show how writers and thinkers of the Harlem renaissance were able to express their thoughts and feelings about sexuality, both straight and queer, at a time of intense focus solely on racial identity. This is an important topic for me because I am interested in the topics and issues that were on the margins of the Harlem renaissance, like queerness. This idea came from noticing the queer themes in Passing by Nella Larsen and Smoke, Lillies and Jade by Richard Bruce Nugent in Fire!!! Magazine. I will call upon my recent blog post “Close encounters of the same kind” and my earlier posts about The Crisis Magazine and other materials we read in class.
Bibliography: Fire!!! Magazine, Passing by Nella Larsen, The Crisis Magazine. https://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40338798, https://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.38.3.162, https://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fear18322.15
Dear Christopher,
Your focus on ” how writers and thinkers of the Harlem renaissance were able to express their thoughts and feelings about sexuality, both straight and queer, at a time of intense focus solely on racial identity” is intriguing and contains an underlying warrant (e.g an underlying idea) that is worthy of notice: race is often considered the primary or the main focus of identity, especially within the Black community, so the task of incorporating or advancing a queer identity potentially has to contend with multiple forms of oppression OR (entirely up to you) might involve an opportunity to think about blackness differently. What if these authors (especially Nugent), by embracing black queerness expand possibilities for black people? His art or writing certainly embraces the “new” or modern with its experimental stream of consciousness form. I also encourage you to read more into the biography of Countee Cullen or Alain Locke, who are both queer figures of the Harlem Renaissance (although Locke was more open).