Overview

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 (“How it Felt to be Colored Zora”), 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 predominantly African American town in North Central Florida (her father was the mayor), 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 (“Creativity of the Harlem Renaissance”) addresses the evolution of the Harlem Renaissance, specifically as it related to the art of the movement, who was responsible for the depiction of Black Americans and how they went about doing that, and the intertwined nature of art and literature within the Renaissance. Beginning by focusing on depictions of Black portraits by white artists, the blog post notes how the early writings and art of the period were found in magazines that mostly catered to a white readership. These early writings by writers such as Du Bois and Locke helped to establish the credentials of prominent Black intelligentsia at the time and paved the way for the establishment of magazines like Fire!!! that were black owned and operated. The blog concludes by noting that the Harlem Renaissance was not just a literary movement, as we often think of it as, but a multifaceted movement of which art was also a central element.

The third blog chosen (“The Harlem of Imagination and the Harlem of Memory”) focuses on the different ideas and feelings that are conveyed by fictive and non-fiction writing and extends that idea to include art (fiction) versus photographs (non-fiction). In the post I argue that works of fiction can help us to better contextualize how it felt to be in a time and place, such as the Harlem Renaissance, by giving insights into the thoughts and perceptions of the characters and narrators of these works. By explaining to us the way they saw the Harlem of their time, we can start to form our own understanding of what it would have been like to be in their shoes. Paintings work in a similar way, showing us colorfully (as in Jacob Lawrence’s painting This Is Harlem) what the neighborhood looked like through the painters’ artistic lens. Conversely, works of non-fiction (including photographs) provide us with some base information and hopefully give us some context with which to better understand the information that we are reading or looking at. These non-fiction writings and photos tell us what was going on and exactly what it looked like. Ideally, looking at fictive and non-fiction works help the reader/viewer have access to both real and perceived accounts and images of a time and place, and that is what we have done in this class to help foster a deeper understanding of just what the Harlem Renaissance was.

The final blog, my contemporary blog (This Is Harlem), is a reflection on our class walking tour of Harlem. As mentioned in the blog, my main takeaway from that walking tour was how much history happened in this one neighborhood, and how important of a place it is in the history of Black America. You could tell that our tour guide was only scratching the surface of the stories and history that he could tell us about Harlem, and we probably could have walked around for hours and not run out of places to see or things to learn about what happened there. It was a beautiful day to walk around and learn about the actual place that we have been reading so much about, and to hear these stories from a resident who had lived in Harlem all his life was an amazing experience.

While each of the blog posts that I have chosen for this project highlight a different aspect of the Harlem Renaissance, be it from Zora Neale Hurston’s ideas on self-identity and what being a Black woman meant to her, to the intersection of art and literature and the importance of art and depiction within the Harlem Renaissance, to the ways that we can use both fictive and non-fiction works to better understand what the movement looked and felt like, these posts were kind of all over the place and highlight just how many different ideas and issues existed and were explored within the movement (and in this class). The Harlem Renaissance was not something as simple as a literary movement, it was a complex cultural movement that spawned a vast breadth of ideas related to identity, depiction, art, intellectual ideas, Jazz, and much, much more. The Harlem Renaissance was truly a multidimensional movement whose importance and legacy continue to live on.

Finally, one of the things that was new to me in this class was doing archival research. The amount of archived information that we have access to 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 Colorstruck kind of humanize the Renaissance, and all of that is available to us because of the archives. 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.

 

 

Cumulative Works Cited

  • Jackson, L. M. (2022, February 15). The Zora Neale Hurston we don’t talk about. The New Yorker. Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-zora-neale-hurston-we-dont-talk-about
  • “How it Feels to be Colored Me.” World Tomorrow, 11 (May, 1928) 215-216. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott Publishers, 1935.
  • McWhorter, J. (2011, January 5). The root: Zora Neale Hurston was a conservative. NPR. Retrieved April 26, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2011/01/05/132674087/the-root-zora-neale-hurston-was-a-conservative
  • Norwood, A. R. (n.d.). Zora Neale Hurston. National Women’s History Museum. Retrieved April 26, 2022, from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/zora-hurston
  • Art Movement: Harlem renaissance art. Artland Magazine. (2021, September 13). Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-harlem-renaissance/#:~:text=The%20Visual%20Arts%20of%20the%20Harlem%20Renaissance&text=Douglas%20was%20influenced%20by%20modernist,from%20Benin%2C%20Congo%20and%20Senegal.
  • (n.d.). Opportunity. Google Books. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://books.google.com/books?id=JcgZAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA362&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
  • Harlem, Mecca of the new negro. Yale University Library. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/17368696
  • POC Zine ProjectFollow this publisher – current follower count:474. (2013, July 4). Fire!! devoted to younger negro artists (1926). Issuu. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://issuu.com/poczineproject/docs/poczp_fire_1926_readview
  • Survey Associates. (1925). Harlem, Mecca of the new negro. Yale University Library. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/17368696
  • Magazine, S. (2017, September 5). Why the works of visionary artist Jacob Lawrence still resonate a century after his birth. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-works-visionary-artist-jacob-lawrence-still-resonate-century-after-his-birth-180964706/