The Harlem Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #479

by Cheryl A. Wall

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural awakening among African Americans between the two world wars. It was the cultural phase of the "New Negro" movement, a social and political phenomenon that promoted a proud racial identity, economic independence, and progressive politics.

In this Very Short Introduction , Cheryl A. Wall captures the Harlem Renaissance's zeitgeist by identifying issues and strategies that engaged writers, musicians, and visual artists alike. She introduces key figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, along with such signature texts as "Mother to Son," "Harlem Shadows," and Cane. In examining the "New Negro," she looks at the art of photographer James Van der Zee and painters Archibald Motley and Laura Wheeler and the way Marita Bonner, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen explored the dilemmas of gender identity for New Negro women. Focusing on Harlem as a cultural capital, Wall covers theater in New York, where black musicals were produced on Broadway almost every year during the 1920s. She also depicts Harlem nightlife with its rent parties and clubs catering to working class blacks, wealthy whites, and gays of both races, and the movement of Renaissance artists to Paris.

From Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" to W.E.B. Du Bois's novel Dark Princess, black Americans explored their relationship to Africa. Many black American intellectuals met African intellectuals in Paris, where they made common cause against European colonialism and race prejudice. Folklore - spirituals, stories, sermons, and dance - was considered raw material that the New Negro artist could alchemize into art. Consequently, they applauded the performance of spirituals on the concert stage by artists like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson. The Harlem Renaissance left an indelible mark not only on African American visual and performing arts, but, as Cheryl Wall shows, its legacies are all around us.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Literature, Art, Poetry, Jazz

152 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2016

About the author

Cheryl A. Wall was a Professor of English at Rutgers University, specializing in African-American women's writing of the Harlem Renaissance.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Harlem Renaissance In The Very Short Introduction Series

The Very Short Introduction Series of Oxford University Press offers accessible, pocket-size books to introduce readers to a broad range of subjects. Cheryl Wall's recent (2016) book, the 479th in the series, offers a short but detailed survey of the Harlem Renaissance and its significance. Wall, a literary critic and Professor of English at Rutgers University, has written earlier books about black women writers in the Harlem Renaissance; she has also edited the two-volume Library of America collection of the works of Zora Neale Hurston, an author who is prominently featured in this Very Short Introduction.

Wall's "The Harlem Renaissance" takes the reader through the origins and nature of the Harlem Renaissance and some of its major figures. The Harlem Renaissance was a literary, intellectual, and artistic movement of African Americans to forge a new identity for themselves and to break free of demeaning stereotypes. The movement centered in but was not limited to Harlem. Scholars disagree about the scope and chronological boundaries of the movement, but Wall places it, roughly, in the period between the World Wars. Wall traces the origins of the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration of African Americans from the South and to the end of WW I. She describes the nature of the Renaissance as follows:

"It was not just a time when the Negro was in vogue, although it was certainly that; it was also a time when black people redefined themselves and announced their entrance into modernity. They responded to its opportunities and its challenges: urbanization, technology, and the disruption of traditional social arrangements and values. The Harlem Renaissance occurred against the backdrop of the Great Migration, the mass movement of black people from the rural South to northern cities that gained momentum during the First World War."

Wall describes the growth of Harlem and important events that showed the rise of an important cultural movement, including the 1921 success of the musical "Shuffle Along" and a 1924 dinner at Manhattan's Civic Club that featured many Harlem writers and introduced them to a broader audience of New York City's cultural elite. In brief chapters, Wall describes how Harlem Renaissance figures explored African American experience in Harlem, the South, and in Africa, and, most importantly, in their own selves, as they tried and often succeeded in creating important works of lasting value.

For a short work, Wall describes and discusses many individuals. She discusses poets including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Sterling Brown, musicians including Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, intellectuals including W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson, novelists such as Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer, critics such as Jesse Faucet, and artists including Laura Wheeler and Aaron Douglas. The work of many of these individuals crossed genre lines. Walls also gives substantial attention to Marcus Garvey, an early proponent of African American racial unity and the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Wall discusses both broad themes underlying and creating the Harlem Renaissance and also the specific work of individuals. Thus, she often offers broad overviews at the outset of each chapter and then follows-up by lengthy treatment of the work of specific figures. Her discussions of individuals and of some of the specific works of these individuals are thoughtful and insightful, particularly of poetry, of Jean Toomer's "Cane", and of the works of Hurston. A critic and a literary scholar, Wall sometimes gets bogged down in the analysis of individual literary works. Her analyses on occasion distract from the broad purpose of the book in giving an overview of the Harlem Renaissance.

The book succeeds in the aim of the Very Short introduction series in introducing the reader to an important subject and, for some readers, encouraging further exploration. I enjoyed revisiting the Harlem Renaissance with Wall and learned both about figures with whom I was familiar and about some figures that Wall introduced to me. Readers both familiar and unfamiliar with the Harlem Renaissance will learn from this book, which includes a good brief bibliography for those moved to read further.

Robin Friedman

[winkler · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved!

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short introduction but packed with information about the historical, social, and cultural contexts, the various intellectuals, writers, and artists, and the key literary and social events. Equally important are its interesting discussions of the tensions, conflicts, and qualifications around the phenomenon of the Harlem Renaissance, or to give it its earlier name, the New Negro Renaissance. Women writers and artists are restored to their rightful place.

[Milena.Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so interesting and so well written. I would recommend it to any art and literature nerd!! Like, really, read it!

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

By far one of the better volumes in this series.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve found the Very Short Introductions to be of uneven quality; this is one of the very best I’ve read.

In some ways, a survey on a distinct cultural era or movement may be the perfect topic for a short introduction; at any rate, this is especially well done. This volume discusses a slew of poets, writers, artists, and musicians who made up the Harlem Renaissance. Wall’s chapters address the temporal and physical stretch of the movement, the way the participants worked to shape a new identity for Black Americans, the special role of Harlem as a place, attitudes towards Africa, attitudes towards the American South, and the inspiration the Harlem Renaissance provided to contemporaries in Europe and later generations in the U.S. The book is an excellent jumping-off point from which to pursue the works of specific artists - now I want to read works by Rudolph Fisher and Jean Toomer.

There’s almost nothing in this short guide about the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on non-Black Americans of color, and nothing about how White Americans understood or were shaped by the movement - the focus stays closely on what the Black artists and intellectuals said and did, how they understood their identities and expressed them in their works.

[Jasonlylescampbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good and fun to read a little book like this. Taught me a lot about the Harlem Renaissance:

I didn't realize that it was mainly a short time---between the Great War and the Great Depression. It spans to include more artist than that, but it definitely only includes artists who were around Harlem during those times --- Hughes, Wright, Hurston and does not include writers like Baldwin (who wrote in the 50s and 60s).

I also didn't think through that it was a renaissance and so included visual artists, sculptors, musicians as well as intellectuals like DuBois and unique people like Marcus Garvey. Exploration of self and identity.

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent primer on the Harlem Renaissance. I liked the organization, with chapters on a brief overview, the origins of the Harlem Renaissance, the district of Harlem itself, the relation of the "New Negros" with Africa, and with the American South, and a final chapter on the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. In the process of discussing these topics, Ms. Wall also discusses a whole plethora of the artists involved--the short story writers and novelists, the essayists, the poets, the musicians, the painters and sculptures, the dancers and singers. This was a very meaty read, with a lot of information crammed into less than 120 pages.

[֍ elle ֍ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The books in the Very Short Introduction series have been, in my experience, very hit and miss. Some of them are great little primers, and some of them read like a professor who’s been given 100 pages to freestyle an essay on all the little odd bits of flotsam and jetsam have been floating around their heads on a given topic. Which is to say, interesting, if not particularly cohesive or edifying.

This book, however, superseded that binary and is something entirely new: a great little primer that is still interesting and opinionated and critical. I think the biggest compliment you can give to one of these is that it made me interested in checking out more of the author’s scholarly work.

[Jason Ray Carney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative survey of the Harlem Renaissance that emphasizes how this artistic and intellectual movement was not merely a geographically-centered development but consisted of non-Harlem writers, musicians, and artists responding to the African-American exerpience during the interwar period. Surprisingly broad in scope, it explores the tensions inherent in the movement centered on issues such as Pan-Africanism, the legacy of American slavery, modernism, and more. Highly recommend for an initial foray into the Harlem Renaissance, and particularly so for literary enthusiasts.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the Very Short Introduction series that OUP has published. They are exactly what they say: short intros into large topics. This one on the Harlem Renaissance is excellent at laying out the history of the movement. It provides a list of suggested reading from the movement itself as well as history and criticism. Terrific way to jump into a topic of interest that you know nothing or little about. Their is a seven page listing of other subjects in each book as well.

[Mind the Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

National Theatre hittade mig antagligen genom att söka på 'Harlem Renaissance necklace' på Etsy. Det leder fram till Langston Hughes. När kontakt etablerats bad de mig att fokusera på ytterligare två figurer från samma era: Zora Neale Hurston och Joséphine Baker. Då behövde jag friska upp minnet sedan den obskyra fördjupningskursen i humaniora på 90-talet och läste den här. Där finns allt man behöver veta, inte minst ett antal sidor om den på sistone aktualiserade romanen Passing.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title about sums it up-- a short review of the Harlem Renaissance. I don't have a ton of background of this renaissance, but overall the text did a good job at highlighting critical players and explaining their contributions and the ideologies that drove them.

[Courtney Hatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very impressive how many figures, how much history, and how many themes Dr Wall contextualizes in such a small space. This must’ve taken ages to write. I particularly appreciated the focus on female writers, artists, and thinkers, which, of course, is Dr Wall’s expertise. Great resource.

[Debra Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

engaging - very informative

[Aurora Dimitre]

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