Transcript Camelia Elias

American Studies
Camelia Elias
The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem is vicious
Modernism. Bang Clash.
Vicious the way it's made,
Can you stand such beauty.
So violent and transforming.
- Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
historical background
 Reconstruction in the
South ends (1877):
 civil rights accorded to
blacks are rolled back
 “Jim Crow” segregation
laws passed in 1880s and
1890s
 “separate but equal”
facilities required
 Context for Booker T.
Washington’s “Atlanta
Exposition Address”:
 “In all things that are purely
social we can be as
separate as the fingers, yet
one as the hand in all
things essential to mutual
progress.”
historical background
 lynching: average about
100 per year in 1880s
and 1890s.
 large numbers of black
Americans migrate to
northern/midwestern
cities.
 1910: 10% of American
black population lives
outside of the South
 1920: 20% of American
black population lives
outside of the south.
 1908: NAACP founded,
“adopting a strategy of
protest and resistance,”
which gains popularity
with black middle class in
north.
 WWI: All black regiments
raise hopes for social
advances for AfricanAmericans.
 After WWI: soldiers
return home; racial
tensions erupt, resulting
in riots.
Harlem
 with the influx of black Americans from the south
(esp. the Atlantic south), New York City, (esp.
Harlem and Greenwich Village areas) becomes
a major destination
 exactly when the Harlem Renaissance started is
still debated; scholars offer a number of dates:
1914; 1919 (returning black troops); 1923
(publication of Cane)
 sometimes called the New Negro Art Movement
or the New Negro Renaissance, The Harlem
Renaissance refers to “the literary and artistic
arm of a massive social movement.”
intellectual background
 an outburst of creative
activity from 1920-1930
amongst AfricanAmericans
 African Americans were
encouraged to become
“The New Negro”
 this term was coined by
philosopher, sociologist
and critic Alain LeRoy
Locke in 1925
Blacks cannot achieve social equality
by emulating white ideals; that equality
can be achieved only by teaching
Black racial pride with an emphasis on
an African cultural heritage (Locke)
• describe black life from a black
perspective
The Harlem Renaissance
 according to Locke, the Harlem Renaissance
transformed "social disillusionment to race pride."
 The Renaissance was good timing because it was
between WWI and the Great Depression
 Black-owned magazines and newspapers flourished,
freeing African Americans from the constricting
influences of mainstream white society
 Opportunity and The Crisis (a publication of the NAACP)
are the two leading magazines and newspapers that
paved the way for other African American writers such as
Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, etc.
W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963)
 founder and editor of The
Crisis, the flagship publication
of NAACP
 helped publicize the
achievements of countless
African-American writers and
other intellectuals
 advanced his conviction that
literature and art could
enhance the image of African
Americans
 became the first African
American to receive a Ph.D.
from Harvard University
 The Souls of Black Folk, his
essay collection published in
1903, had such an immediate
and intense impact on black
artists and thinkers that it was
hailed as an instant classic
contributing factors
 the Great Migration to northern cities between 1919 and
1926
 trend in American society towards experimentation
during the 1920s
 rise in radical Black intellectuals such as Locke, Marcus
Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois
 "(Harlem) is romantic in its own right. And it is hard and strong,
its noise, heat, cold, cries and colours are so. And the nostalgia
is violent too; the eternal radio seeping through everything day
and night, indoors and out, becomes somehow the
personification of restlessness, desire, brooding.“
Nancy Cunard, Harlem Review, 1933
Harlem and black identity
 new ways of thinking led to new ways of
expressing one’s self.
 identity was explored through
Art
Music
Literature
aims and concerns
 African-Americans work together to achieve
similar goals;
 “the period is noteworthy as a time of pointed critical
consciousness.”
 this critical consciousness about what it means
to be a black American is seen:
 in the publication of Locke’s anthology
 in other collections of black writers
 in the establishment of journals published by the
National Urban League and the NAACP.
characteristics in music
 Harlem was the center of
not just a literary
renaissance, but also a
musical and artistic
renaissance
 the development of
modern jazz is especially
associated with Harlem
cabarets
 syncopated and off-beat
music
characteristics in poetry
 In poetry, two major trends are apparent:
experimentation with verse form that takes its
inspiration from African-American musical
idiom” (slave songs, the blues, jazz).
the exploration of traditional verse forms
Harlem Renaissance ideology
 sought to break down racial stereotypes
 emphasized the beauty and significance of
the American black experience.
 emphasized and celebrated the creative
ability of black Americans.
 was “optimistic about the Negro’s future in
America and thought integration a realistic
though distant goal.”
Louis Armstrong
"Louis Armstrong's station in the history of
jazz is umimpeachable. If it weren't for him,
there wouldn't be any of us." Dizzy Gillespie,
1971
Trumpet Player by Langston
Hughes
Three poems
 was born in New Orleans, but
influenced many musicians
when he was in Chicago and
New York during the 1920s and
1930s
 considered the King of Jazz
Jelly Roll Morton
Original Jelly
Roll Rag
 Jelly Roll Morton was the first great
composer and piano player of Jazz.
 as a teenager he worked in the
whorehouses of Storyville as a piano
player.
 he worked as a gambler, pool shark,
pimp, vaudeville comedian and as a
pianist.
 he was an important transitional
figure between ragtime and jazz
piano styles.
 he fell upon hard times after 1930
and even lost the diamond he had in
his front tooth.
Bessie Smith
 was one of the
most popular
African American
recording stars of
the 1920s
 was popular with
Black and White
fans
 “Empress of Blues”
I need a little sugar in my bowl
Aaron Douglas
 his work best exemplified
the “New Negro”
 his work was showcased
as murals on buildings
and as cover art and
illustrations to works in
The Crisis.
"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art
painting black...let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter,
through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the
very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough,
neglected. Then let's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let's do the impossible.
Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy.
Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.“
- Aaron Douglas
Jacob Lawrence
“The Great Migration”
 child-like, primitive
expression
 contrast in colors
 realism
 no details (cannot see
their faces)
 lots of them are in train
stations (moving to the
north)
 same basic colors in
every painting
 migrating to all of the big
cities
Jacob Lawrence
South to North….
…or migration to Europe
"We can make all our dreams
come true, but first we have to
decide to awaken from them."
Josephine Baker 1906-1975
Langston Hughes 1902-1967
 one of the most important
figures in the Harlem
Renaissance
 his writing was influenced by
the life and art of African
Americans, such as jazz
 he told the stories of the
people in a way that reflected
their culture including both
their suffering and their love of
laughter, language and music
 his self proclaimed calling was
"to explain and illuminate the
Negro condition in America."
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Countee Cullen
 was raised and educated in a primarily white
community, and he differed from other poets of
the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes
in that he lacked the background to comment
from personal experience on the lives of other
blacks or use popular black themes in his
writing.
 used ‘white’ forms in his poetry (sonnet, ode,
ballad  ‘mimics’ Keats & Shelley)
 modern by being anti-modern
Women and the Harlem Renaissance
 Ana Arnold and Ethel
Ray (see doc)
 Zora Neale Hurston
 Nella Larsen
 ….against the male
background
Langston Hughes, Charles S.
Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier,
Rudolph Fisher, & Hubert Delany.
Zora Neale Hurston
I am not tragically colored. There
is no great sorrow dammed up in
my soul, nor lurking behind my
eyes. I do not mind at all. I do
not belong to the sobbing school
of Negrohood who hold that
nature somehow has given them
a lowdown dirty deal and whose
feelings are all hurt about it. . . .
No, I do not weep at the world—I
am too busy sharpening my
oyster knife.
To me, bitterness is the underarm
odor of wishful weakness. It is
the graceless acknowledgement
of defeat.
Reviews of Their Eyes were Watching God
The dedication of the town’s first lamp and the
community burial of an old mule are rich in
humor but they are not cartoons. Many incidents
are unusual, and there are narrative gaps in
need of building up. Miss Hurston’s forte is the
recording and the creation of folk-speech. . . .
Though inclined to violence and not strictly
conventional, her people are not naive
primitives. About human needs and frailties they
have the unabashed shrewdness of the Blues.
Sterling Brown The Nation (October 16, 1937)
Richard Wright, New Masses (October 5, 1937)
Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever
to move in the direction of serious fiction. . . . Miss
Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the
tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the
theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes
the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and
laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a
pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in
which America likes to see the Negro live: between
laughter and tears. . . . The sensory sweep of her
novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.
In the main, her novel is not addressed to the
Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic
tastes she knows how to satisfy.
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
 Was a light skinned black with
white facial features
 Mother was of Danish decent
and father was West Indian
 attended Fisk University in
Nashville, TN (1909-1910)
 continued education at
University of Copenhagen
(1910-1912)
 studied nursing at Lincoln
Hospital in New York City
(1912-1915)
 was legally black but wanted to
identify herself with both races
(white and black)
 Quicksand (1928)
 Passing 1929
 “Sanctuary” 1930
Quicksand (1928)
 how are the notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’
thematized in the novel?
 discuss how the relationship between ‘past’,
‘present’ and ‘future’ is thematized.
 discuss Larsen’s theme of double
consciousness.
 how does Helga Crane use her sexuality and
power?
 discuss the notion of performing identity vs.
established identity