Transcript Double-Consciousness

Harlem Renaissance
Themes for Analysis
Double-Consciousness
• African-Americans’
struggle to claim a
distinct cultural identity
and yet be seen as
American
• Obstacles:
discrimination,
stereotypes, lost African
heritage, White
approval/disapproval
• Essays: “Song of the
Seventh Son,” “Criteria
of Negro Art,” “The
Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain,”
“How it Feels to Be
Colored Me”
• Why is integration and
assimilation different
for African-Americans
as compared to
European immigrants?
And as always, look for how this discussion is still present or important today.
New Negro Identity
• Primitivism – Modernism
creates an interest in the
exotic and primitive.
• The use of African settings,
images, and symbols attracts
whites and fulfills a desire to
search for the roots of a lost
heritage.
• How did this new identity
seek to overcome doubleconsciousness? Did it
succeed? Why or why not?
• Seeks to obliterate old
stereotypes
• Obligation to present the
beauty and truth of AfricanAmerican life
• Promote racial pride
• Through integration and
contact of the white and
black upper classes new
understanding will emerge
• Essays: “The New Negro
Identity,” “The Criteria of
Negro Art,” “When the
Negro was in Vogue”
And as always, look for how this discussion is still present or important today.
The Purpose of African-American Art
• “All Art is Propaganda”
• Dubois, Locke, and others
criticize all Black art that
doesn’t portray AfricanAmericans positively
• Seek to undue the damage
done by years of racial
stereotypes
• Essays: “The Criteria of Negro
Art,” “The New Negro
Identity”
• Find examples of poems that
expose the effects of
discrimination, combat racial
stereotypes and promote pride
and activism in the first
section of your packet.
• “True Negro art” must
resist the urge “towards
whiteness.”
• Langston Hughes, Zora
Neale Hurston and others
look towards folk music and
stories to represent a more
authentic racial identity
• Essays: “When the Negro
was in Vogue,” “How it
Feels to Be Colored Me,”
“The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain”
• Find examples of this more
“authentic” identity in some
of the poems in the second
section of your packet.
And as always, look for how this discussion is still present or important today.