scholarly journals ‘Jazz at Night and the Classics in the Morning’: musical double-consciousness in short fiction by Langston Hughes

Popular Music ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia M. Miyakawa
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
To Come ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance – intellectuals such as Jessie Faucet, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois – hoped to gain respect for African Americans through participation in emblems of high culture such as poetry, novels, serious plays, and the highest of all classical music genres: the symphony.1 They encouraged artists to mine folk themes for use in new, elevating works, transforming ‘indigenous’ materials into uplifting examples of high cultural resonance. Artists themselves, however, were ambivalent about privileging ‘high’ art, and especially so when making and writing about music. Indeed, as Samuel Floyd has argued, the most vibrant music to come out of the Harlem Renaissance took the form of blues, boogie woogie, and hot jazz, found in venues such as clubs, juke joints, rent parties, and stage shows (Floyd 1990, pp. 5–6).

Sahdiji, an African Ballet (1931): Queer Connections and the “Myth of the Solitary Genius”

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (S1) ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Victoria Phillips Geduld
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Dance History ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
William Grant Still ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

In May 1931 the ballet Sahdji premiered at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York: with a libretto by Harlem Renaissance's Alain Locke and Richard Bruce Nugent, music by composer William Grant Still, the ballet by Thelma Biracree, and dedicated to the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, the work was set in Africa and performed by dancers in blackface. In 1934 the work was performed with an all-black cast in Chicago and revived in Rochester through 1950. Sahdji demonstrates that the participants shared two tenets: the desire to create high art, and the belief in African forms to achieve artistic aims. Locke and Nugent had a small shared world that included Lincoln Kirstein. Locke wrote about The Rite of Spring, and Sahdji became Locke's African answer to Spring. Sahdji begs for a reinvigoration of dance history that credits philosophical underpinnings of the American ballet to the Harlem Renaissance and its queer connections.

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

scholarly journals A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Whit Frazier Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Celebrity Gossip ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.

On Art and Such

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-118
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Primary Site ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter charts the debates on art and aesthetics that preoccupied writers during the Harlem Renaissance. It is argued that because African Americans had made slight political and economic progress they turned to the arts as the primary site for social justice. The questions generated by the ensuing aesthetic debates about the purpose of racial art, its form, its audience, and the efficacy of cultural difference, reverberated throughout the twentieth century. This chapter also analyzes the formal innovations made by African American essayists. It is shown through the examples of Alain Locke’s intellectual detachment, Langston Hughes’ fiery polemic, George Schuyler’s acerbic satire, and Zora Neale Hurston’s “jagged harmonies” that the essayists of the Harlem Renaissance both formulated and enacted the aesthetic they proposed in their writings.

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
George Schuyler ◽  
Focus Point ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.

scholarly journals Art of Characterization in “Thank You, Ma'am” by Langston Hughes

IJOHMN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Muhammad Javaid Anwar ◽  
Basri Sattar ◽  
Muhammad Naveed Anwar
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
American Artist ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes was an American artist, writer, and dramatist whose African-American subjects made him an essential supporter of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Langston Hughes was conceived on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He distributed his first lyric in 1921. He went to Columbia University, yet left following one year to travel. He proceeded to compose incalculable works of verse, writing and plays, and in addition a prominent section for the Chicago Defender. He passed away from this world on May 22, 1967. (Editors, 2014) When you were younger, has anyone treated you good or bad according to your behavior? Or do you remember any incident of your life in which you made a mistake and someone offered you a chance for changing your life? Langston Hughes' short story, “Thank You, Ma'am”, distributed in 1958, catches the two circumstances. Langston Hughes was a vital and productive essayist amid the Harlem Renaissance of the mid twentieth century. He expounded on African-American life and experience. Much thanks to You Ma'am is about what happens when a high school kid and a more seasoned working lady crash on a Harlem road. There are three major topics present in “Thank You, Ma'am”: Forgiveness and Empathy, the Power of Love and Trust, and Christian Charity. At the point when Roger first grabs the handbag of Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, she wrestles him and hauls him to her outfitted room at the back of a house. The peak of the story is when Roger does not leave.

Contextualizing Race and Gender in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess

Black Opera ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 85-119
Author(s):  
Naomi André
Keyword(s):  
James Baldwin ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
First Century ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Porgy And Bess ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. This analysis fleshes out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter also explores the opera in terms of constructions of the folk, the Harlem Renaissance, and the efforts of black writers (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Harold Cruse, and James Baldwin) to come to grips with its negative stereotypes and celebrated opportunities for black performers in virtuosic roles.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document