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 Alain Locke emerged as prominent literary voices during the movement, and magazines and periodicals like The Crisis and Fire!!! were seminal publications that helped to give voice to the ideas of the writers and help their efforts to advance Black causes. These writers and their fictive and nonfiction work helped to establish the literary credentials that we have come to know it as today, but it is also important to acknowledge and appreciate how much more the Renaissance was than that.

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 artistic element to the movement, which I was interested in. While taking this class, the things I found myself interested in expanded from art to include representation and identity, the power of drawings and photos, and the intersection and effectiveness of fictive and nonfiction works, themes that my blog posts reflect. For this blog site, I have chosen to focus on the multidimensionality of the Harlem Renaissance and highlight the importance and the worthiness of exploring all the different themes and aspects of the Renaissance, which go well beyond the intellectual writings of Du Bois and his peers.

The first blog that I am highlighting is one that I wrote about Zora Neale Hurston, one of the preeminent and most prolific female writers of the Renaissance. Hurston’s famous essay, How it Feels to be Colored Me, delves into her childhood and upbringing in a Black town in North Central Florida, and explores her self-identity and how she came to an understanding of who she was as a person and what her Blackness meant to her. In the post I drew a parallel to the character Claire Kendry that we have seen in our reading of the novel Passing by Nella Larson (and the viewing of the eponymous Netflix film adaptation), noting that for both Hurston in real life and Claire in fiction, Blackness was a feature that they were cool with but did not necessarily celebrate. When doing research on Hurston, I was surprised to learn that she was conservative, especially given her role in such a progressive movement like the Renaissance. This demonstrates how diverse the ideologies within the movement were and gives us an idea of the dynamic personalities and ideas about racial and self-identity that were present in the Renaissance, which included a spectrum of ideas as opposed to a monolithic block of like-minded writers and artists.

The next blog that I chose to highlight addresses…

 

One of the things that was new to me in this class was doing archival research. The amount of archived information is amazing, and many lesser-known works preserved in there taught me a lot about the time. Reading stories like Smoke, Jade and Lilies and Cordelia the Crude, as well as reading Hurston’s play      kind of humanize the Renaissance, and all of that is available to us because of the archive. The fact that we are learning so much about the Harlem Renaissance, specifically, highlights the importance of Black digital humanities studies. Black history in this country is rich and dynamic, and archival research into the Renaissance offers us a glimpse into this influential time of the Black American experience.