Creating New Blackness: The Expressions of the Harlem Renaissance

In this intermediate seminar, students will study various texts from writers and artists associated with The Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance. This movement refers to the highly productive period of African American arts and letters occurring roughly between 1920 and 1935, although its chronological boundaries tend to shift depending on the literary historian's persuasion. This course will engage with that popular and largely taken-for-granted notion of an artistic movement of Black Americans identified exclusively with one district in New York City. Writers and artists whose work (photography, film, poetry, music, and works of fiction and nonfiction) we may engage include, but are not limited to, James Vander Zee, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, and Paul Robeson. Using a range of critical essays as supplementary reading, we will begin by exploring how Harlem gets constructed as city myth and as work of art, while examining the place it occupied in the cultural imagination of the l920s and ’30s. Why was Harlem considered an exotic-erotic pleasure/tourist zone for some and, for others, the emblem of a utopian ethos of racial renewal and political progress? What were some of the generational tensions among the writers associated most popularly with the movement, as well as the economics of literary production? How were artists patronized and marketed to the American public/s, and what were the corresponding effects of the patronage system on black artistic production—and reception?