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Literary Dictionary:

Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance, a notable phase of black American writing centred in Harlem (a predominantly black area of New York City) in the 1920s. Announced by Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925), the movement included the poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, continuing into the 1930s with the novels of Zora NealeHurston and Arna Bontemps. It brought a new self‐awareness and critical respect to black literature in the United States.

 
 

A blossoming (c. 1918 – 37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, centred in Harlem in New York City. As a literary movement, it laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had a significant impact on black literature and consciousness worldwide. Its leading literary figures included James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Alain Locke (1886 – 1954), and Wallace Thurman (1902 – 34). Their work both fed and took inspiration from the creative and commercial growth of jazz and a concurrent burgeoning of work by black visual artists such as Aaron Douglas. Central to the movement were efforts to explore all aspects of the African American experience and to reconceptualize "the Negro" independent of white stereotypes.

For more information on Harlem Renaissance, visit Britannica.com.

 
Photography Encyclopedia: Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance, an internationally acclaimed flowering of African-American cultural production, including photography, between the wars. The rapid modernization of the African-American population during the early 20th century, the by-product of migration, urbanization, industrialization, the First World War, and a volatile racial climate, forged a national consciousness and sense of community. Efforts to make American society acknowledge the full citizenship of black Americans occurred on multiple fronts, coalescing into the so-called New Negro Movement. Socio-economic circumstances had engendered a distinctive, self-determined identity and culture, manifested not only in political activity but also at the personal level, through the carefully cultivated presentation of the body by means of attire, coiffure, cosmetics, and comportment. The figure of the ‘New Negro’ epitomized the modern sensibility that African-Americans claimed, and deployed to counteract the derogatory caricatures that pervaded the American imagination. Recognizing the power of photography and other new visual technologies, African-American-owned studios emerged to cater to the demand for portraiture that recorded New Negro self-fashioning. The output of photographers such as James L. Allen, James Van Der Zee, and Addison Scurlock (1916-64) constitutes an unprecedented visual record of peoples of African descent in America.

— Camara Dia Holloway

Bibliography

  • Willis, D., Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000)
 
US History Encyclopedia: Harlem Renaissance

Known also by the names Black Renaissance or New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance represented a cultural movement among African Americans roughly between the end of World War I (1918) and the beginning of the Great Depression (1929). The names given to this movement reveal its essential features. Certainly the words "black" and "Negro" mean that this movement centered on African Americans, and the term "renaissance" indicates that something new was born or, more accurately, that a cultural spirit was reawakened in African American cultural life. Although most historians remember the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement, in fact, African Americans during the 1920s also made great strides in musical and visual arts, as well as science. Finally, the focus on Harlem—an old Dutch-built neighborhood of New York City—indicates that this "renaissance" was something of an urban phenomenon. In fact, the exciting developments in African American cultural life of the 1920s were not limited to Harlem, but also had roots in other urban communities where black Americans migrated in great numbers: East St. Louis, Illinois; Chicago's south side; and Washington, D.C.

The artists of the Harlem Renaissance forwarded two goals. Like the journalists and other "crusaders" of the Progressive era, black authors tried to point out the injustices of racism in American life. Second, newspaper editors, activists, authors, and other artists began to promote a more unified and positive culture among African Americans. Early efforts to publicize a more unified consciousness among African Americans included two publications in 1919: Robert Kerlin's collection of editorial material in Voice of the Negro and Emmett Scott's Letters from Negro Migrants. On the political front, leaders such as Marcus Garvey began to put forth plans for black economic self-sufficiency, political separatism, and the creation of a cross-national African consciousness.

Several important developments during the World War I era gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance. First, black southerners since the turn of the century had been moving in large numbers to the North's industrial cities. As a result, southern blacks who had been denied their political rights and had resorted to sharecropping as a means of livelihood came into contact with northern African Americans who were more often the descendants of free blacks and, therefore, had better access to education and employment. Additionally, black Americans moving to the cities had much to complain about. World War I, the so-called war to make the world safe for democracy, had been a bitter experience for most African Americans. The U.S. Army was rigidly segregated, race riots broke out in many American cities during or immediately after the war, and the North was residentially and economically segregated like the South, despite the absence of Jim Crow Laws.

Not all of the forces driving the Harlem Renaissance were negative, however. An influential anthropologist of the time, Zora Neale Hurston, observed that many white American artists began to employ aspects of African American culture in their works; she called these people "Negrotarians." Significant among these were Frank Tannenbaum, author of Darker Phases of the South (1924), and Paul Green, whose 1926 production of In Abraham's Bosom with a mostly black cast won the Pulitzer Prize.

Literature

The literary works of the Harlem Renaissance were products of their writers' racial consciousness but also demonstrated a profundity and beauty that placed many of these writers among the great literary figures of the century. An important originator of the movement, James Weldon Johnson, gave impetus to other black writers in 1922 by publishing the work of contemporary black poets in a volume entitled The Book of American Negro Poetry. Writing throughout the 1920s, Johnson published his re-flections on the decade of black artistic creation in his auto-biographical Black Manhattan (1930). Johnson was joined by another early and influential writer, Jamaican-born Claude McKay. McKay gained notoriety with awareness-raising poems such as "The Lynching." McKay, like fellow Caribbean native Marcus Garvey, displayed the defiance and anger felt by black Americans in the wake of World War I.

The most influential African American poet of the 1920s would prove to be the eloquent Langston Hughes, called the Poet Laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. Early Hughes's poetry such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Mother to Son" reflected his roots in African American culture; these poems were published in The Weary Blues (1926). Later Hughes's work—four poems on the infamous (mis)trial of nine black men accused of rape in Alabama—revealed his heightened political consciousness and were published as Scottsboro Limited (1932). In the waning years of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes turned to satirical short stories on black life with a collection entitled The Ways of White Folks (1934).

Perhaps one of the best fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance was Jessie Redmon Fauset. Well educated at Ivy League schools, Fauset represented the "talented tenth" of African Americans that W. E. B. Du Bois hoped would excel to the point of proving blacks' value to American society. Fittingly, Fauset represented blacks in her novels as mainstream Americans, choosing to weave race issues within her wider interest in cultural problems such as social status and economic well-being. Her most important works included There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), and Comedy: American Style (1933). Other writers—E. Franklin Frazier and Alain Locke, for example—hoped to advance the position of African Americans through scholarship by exposing the problems facing black Americans to induce change, as progressive journalists and novelists had done with health and safety issues before.

Music

Black Americans during the 1920s excelled in fields other than literature. We often remember Jazz as the product of black migration to New Orleans, but the other cities that black artists called home—New York, Chicago, St. Louis, for example—witnessed the development of jazz music as well. Important jazz pianists such as the unofficial "mayor" of Harlem, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum played music at house parties and other gatherings in Manhattan, making music an integral part of the black experience in the urban North. African American band-leaders—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Fletcher Henderson—and vaudeville blues singers—Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith—performed for black and white audiences, thereby influencing popular music in general.

Like Jessie Fauset, composer William Grant Still brought to the Harlem Renaissance a background in American higher education. Trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Still used traditional African American musical idioms to create European-style symphonic music. He was the first black composer to have a symphony played by a major orchestra, the first to conduct a major orchestra, and the first to have an opera produced by a major opera company. In 1931, Still legitimized Afro-inspired aesthetics in Western musical forms in premiering a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance aptly entitled the Afro-American Symphony.

Visual Art

In the world of visual art, the leading graphic artist, and illustrator for many of James Weldon Johnson's works, was Aaron Douglas. In northern cities, black artists such as Douglas wanted to capture their people's movement, energy, and soul as jazz musicians had. One of the most successful artists to do this was Archibald J. Motley Jr. Using vibrant color and flowing shapes, Motley reflected in his work the fast-paced urban life he observed in Chicago.

The Harlem Renaissance as a movement represented a rebirth of African American culture in the United States. As a product of black urban migration and black Americans' disappointment with racism in the United States, the renaissance was aimed at revitalizing black culture with pride. In political life, literature, music, visual art, and other cultural areas, African Americans in the 1920s put forth their individual and collective sense of dignity in the face of an American culture that often considered them second-class citizens.

Bibliography

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. See chapter eighteen, 400–417. Classic, and still excellent, account of the Harlem Renaissance, balancing narrative with interpretation of primary evidence.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Standard monograph on the movement.

———, ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Vast collection of primary documents from the period.

Kellner, Bruce, ed. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. A useful reference tool on people, places, and a variety of other subjects pertaining to the movement.

Kramer, Victor. The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined. New York: AMS, 1987. A large volume of scholarly essays on a wide range of topics within the movement.

Perry, Margaret. The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982. A wonderful research tool on nineteen influential period authors, complete with citations of published works.

Singh, Amritjit. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Literary study of wide cross-section of black authors.

Waldron, Edward E. Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978. A mono-graph on the influential civic leader's role during the period.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Harlem Renaissance,
term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North (1914–18), many who came to New York settled in Harlem, as did a good number of black New Yorkers moved from other areas of the city. Meanwhile, Southern black musicians brought jazz with them to the North and to Harlem. The area soon became a sophisticated literary and artistic center. A number of periodicals were influential in creating this milieu, particularly the magazines Crisis, which was published by W. E. B. Du Bois and urged racial pride among African Americans, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League. Also influential was the book The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), edited by Alain Locke.

Responding to the heady intellectual atmosphere of the time and place, writers and artists, many of whom lived in Harlem, began to produce a wide variety of fine and highly original works dealing with African-American life. These works attracted many black readers. New to the wider culture, they also attracted commercial publishers and a large white readership. Writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance include Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. Visual artists connected with the movement are less generally known. Among the painters are Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Malvin G. Johnson, and William H. Johnson; the best-known sculptor is Augusta Savage. Photographers include James Van Der Zee and Roy De Carava. The Harlem Renaissance faded with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Bibliography

See N. I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971); B. Kellner, ed., The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (1987); L. Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (1989); and H. Bloom, ed., Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1994). In addition, many materials relating to the period can be found in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, N.Y.C.


 
Wikipedia: Harlem Renaissance


The Harlem Renaissance (also known as the Black Literary Renaissance and The New Negro Movement) refers to the blooming of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke in 1925. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Across the cultural spectrum (literature, drama, music, visual art, dance) and also in the realm of social thought (sociology, historiography, philosophy), artists and intellectuals found new ways to explore the historical experiences of black America and the contemporary experiences of black life in the urban North. Challenging white paternalism and racism, African-American artists and intellectuals rejected merely imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans and instead celebrated black dignity and creativity. Asserting their freedom to express themselves on their own terms as artists and intellectuals, they explored their identities as black Americans, celebrating the black culture that had emerged out of slavery and their cultural ties to Africa.

The Harlem Renaissance had a profound impact not only on African-American culture but also on the cultures of the African diaspora as a whole. Afro-Caribbean artists and intellectuals from the British West Indies were part of the movement. Moreover, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.

Origins

The Harlem Renaissance reflected the changes that had taken place in the African American community since the abolititon of slavery, and which had been accelerated as a consequence of the First World War.It can also be seen as specifically African-American response to and expression of the great social and cultural change taking place in America in the early 20th century under the influence of industrialization and the emergence of a new mass culture. Contributions that lead to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance included the great migration of African Americans to the northern cities and the First World War. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.

Most of the participants in the African American literary movement descended from a generation whose parents or grandparents were slaves, and themselves having lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Many of these people were part of the Great Migration out of the South and other racially stratified communities who sought relief from prejudices and a better standard of living in the North and Midwest regions of the United States. Others were Africans and people of African descent from the Caribbean who had come to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem, New York City.

At the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. Immediately after the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cutural self-determination. The failure of Reconstruction resulted in the establishment of a white supremacist regime of Jim Crow in the South, which through laws and through lynching denied African Americans civil and political rights, and undergirded their economic exploitation as share croppers and laborers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans increasingly migrated North.

Despite white racism, the African American community established a middle class, especially in the cities. Harlem, in New York City, became a center of this middle class. In the ninteenth century, the district had been built as an exclusive suburb for the white middle class and upper middle class, with stately houses, grand aveneus and amenities such as the Polo Grounds and an opera house. During the enormous influx of immigrants in the nineteenth century, the once exlusive district was abandoned by the native white middle-class. Harlem became a black neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African American arrived during the First World War.

Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. Seeking better economic opportunities and an escape from the institutional racism of the South, thousands migrated north. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York City. This migration greatly expanded black communities, creating a greater market for black culture. Jazz and Blues, the black music of the South, came to the North with the migrants and was played in the nightclubs and hotspots of Harlem. At the same time, whites were becoming increasingly fascinated by black culture. A number of white artists and patrons began to view blacks and black culture less condenscendingly, and began to offer blacks access to "mainstream" pulblishers and art venues.

The expanding black middle class supported activist groups such as the newly-formed NAACP, lead by W.E.B. Du Bois. After the end of World War I, many African American soldiers came home to a nation that did not always respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil injustices occurred throughout 1919. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey's populist Afrocentric movement also gained popularity.

Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. It is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s, although its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, is placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity magazine hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and then resulting Great Depression).

Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro who through intellect, the production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes of that era to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race. There would be no set style or uniting form singularly characterizing art coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, there would be a mix of celebrating a wide variety of cultural elements, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, "high-culture" and the "low-culture or low-life," from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature like modernism, and in poetry, for example, the new form of jazz poetry. This duality would eventually result in a number of African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance coming into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia who would take issue with certain depictions of black life in whatever medium of the arts.

The Harlem Renaissance was one of primarily African American involvement and an interpersonal support system of black patrons, black owned businesses and publications. However, it also depended on the patronage of white Americans, such as Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided various forms of assistance, opening doors which otherwise would have remained closed to the publicizing of their work outside of the black American community. This support often took the form of patronage or publication. Then, there were those whites interested in so-called "primitive" cultures, as many whites viewed black American culture at that time, and wanted to see this "primitivism" in the work coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. Other interpersonal dealings between whites and blacks can be categorized as exploitative because of the desire to capitalize on the "fad", and "fascination" of the African American being in "vogue". This vogue of the African American would extend to Broadway, as in Porgy and Bess, and into music where in many instances white band leaders would defy racist attitude to include the best and the brightest African American stars of music and song. For blacks, their art was a way to prove their humanity and demand for equality. For a number of whites, preconceived prejudices were challenged and overcome. In the early 20th(early 1900's) century the Harlem Renaissance reflected social and intellectual changes in the African American community. An increase of education and employment opportunities had developed by the turn of the century.

Corresponding with the Harlem Renaissance was the beginning of mainstream publishing. Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time. Publishers began to attract a great amount of attention from the nation at large. Some famous authors during this time included Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke and Eric D. Walrond as well as Langston Hughes.

The Harlem Renaissance would help lay the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, many black artists coming into their own creativity after this literary movement would take inspiration from it.

Popular entertainment

Writers/Literati

Musicians/Composers

See also

References

Bibliography

  • Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995 ISBN 0-14-017036-7
  • Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin, 1997 ISBN 0-14-026334-9
  • Hutchinson,George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. New York: Belknap Press, 1997 ISBN 0-674-37263-8
  • Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973 ISBN 0-19-501665-3
  • Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995 ISBN 0-679-75889-5
  • Andrews, William L.; Foster, Frances S.; Harris, Trudier eds. The Concise Oxford Companion To African American Literature. New York: Oxford Press,2001 ISBN 1-4028-9296-9
  • William Greaves' documentary From These Roots

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Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Photography Encyclopedia. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Harlem Renaissance" Read more

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